On Thu, 29 Aug 2002, Raymond Hettinger wrote:
-- Add a version number argument to Random() which defaults to two.
Why not have a WHRandom() and a MersenneRandom() instance inside module random? That way you can even give a future behavior warning that Random() is about to change and people can either choose the particular generator they want or accept the default. To my mind, this is a case of explicit (actually naming the generator types) is better than implicit (version number? Where's my documentation? Which generator is which version?) Maybe this isn't a big deal now, but I can believe that we might accumulate another RNG or two (there are some good reasons to want *weaker* or correlated RNGs) and having a weaker generator with a *later* version number is just bound to cause havoc. -a