AMDG Thomas Mang wrote:
What is the present library status of the random library,and in how far are the documentation and the code base out-of-sync ?
I just tried a variate_generator with mt19937 as engine and a normal_distribution as distribution. IIRC, then some years ago this did not work as the normal_distribution requires an input in the [0,1] range, but now it seems to work. Looking into the header files I concluded under the hood there has been quite some development going on.
variate_generator is supposed to work with any generator and any distribution.
Also for uniform_01 things apparently changed quite a lot, there is now also for example a new_uniform_01 etc.
It hasn't changed much. The mess there is to make uniform_01 consistent with the other distributions without breaking backwards compatibility.
My main questions: Is the library presently under active development ?
Mostly bug fixes. I'd like to sync the library with the standard at some point, but that's likely to be a while.
Shall I rely on the docs, or not ? For example, is above normal distribution now deliberately working, or am I relying on a deliberately undocumented feature which might be removed later ?
If I recall correctly, the docs are mostly correct although incomplete.
Because many more distributions now exist I think the docs are just totally out of date. Any plans of updating them ?
Yes. There's a draft at http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~swatanabe/random_doc/libs/random/doc/html/ In Christ, Steven Watanabe