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The Clojure test.check library includes an immutable version of the functionality provided by the Java SplittableRandom class, as described by Gary Fredericks in his "Purely Random" talk. However, the API docs for test.check exclude the clojure.test.check.random namespace in which this functionality is implemented. Is this namespace meant to be used directly from code outside of test.check, or should it be treated as an implementation detail and not used in that way?

Sam Estep
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    Not really a question for Stack Overflow, is it? Ask the maintainers? – glts Jun 09 '17 at 20:21
  • @glts Where should this question be asked, exactly? – Sam Estep Jun 09 '17 at 20:24
  • @glts Also, this question doesn't seem very different from [another question](https://stackoverflow.com/q/33845364/5044950) that I've asked in the past; no one said that one was off-topic, so I'm curious why this one would be. – Sam Estep Jun 09 '17 at 20:43
  • what kind of use are you asking about? using the RNG for unrelated things, or using it to write lower-level code that interacts with the rest of test.check? – gfredericks Jun 09 '17 at 21:23
  • @gfredericks Using it for unrelated things. It seems like the best way to deal with random number generation functionally in Clojure as far as I can tell. – Sam Estep Jun 09 '17 at 22:02
  • I think that's a fine way to use it; I think the best situation would be for it to be split into a separate contrib library, but that hasn't happened yet. – gfredericks Jun 10 '17 at 14:06
  • @gfredericks I agree, but I was hesitant to suggest because I know that you guys are generally pretty busy. Would I be able to do anything to help in moving it into its own library? I've signed the Clojure CA, if that means anything. – Sam Estep Jun 10 '17 at 14:16
  • You can propose it on the clojure-dev list, I think they'd be receptive. I think the unclear part would be what the scope of the library should be; e.g., should it have functions with global state like `clojure.core/rand`? Should it have functions that provide interesting distributions, or just 64 bit ints? Etc. – gfredericks Jun 10 '17 at 21:18
  • @gfredericks I've started a [thread](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/clojure-dev/4GykG7Ia4Tc) on the clojure-dev Google group, as you suggested. – Sam Estep Jun 12 '17 at 00:10

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