[m-dev.] for review: extra modes for random.m

[Thomas Conway]

On Thu, Mar 01, 2001 at 03:11:32AM EST, Ralph Becket wrote:
> (1) seems perfectly legitimate to me - there's nothing in that code that
> *requires* mostly-uniqueness; those modes are partly there as a common case 
> sanity check for the unwary programmer (not a bad thing, mind you).

However, as peter pointed out, there are ways around this - ie copy/2.
It is true that you might want to duplicate random number supplies,
bit it is the exception, not the rule, so putting in a call to copy/2
occasionally, and getting error messages if you get your variable
numbering wrong seems like a good idea. Which brings us back to (2)....

> p.s. Thanks to an e-mail problem, I checked in the change before I
> got to see your response.  I hope it doesn't get backed out because
> I need it to work.

There are various places that I've come up against this problem, and
usually, rather than breaking the interfaces, I insert calls to a
wrapper function which is just an inst cast, which I can change to a
no-op when the mode checker does the right thing.

-- 
  Thomas Conway )O+
 <conway at cs.mu.oz.au>       499 User error! Replace user, and press any key.
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