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From: "Nick Roberts" <nickroberts@adaos.worldonline.co.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Rosen Trick [List container strawman]
Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2001 22:51:26 -0000
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Date: 2001-11-03T22:51:26+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

I've always felt that this whole charade is an academic Alice-in-Wonderland
adventure. The right solution, of course, is to use a procedure (with an
in-out parameter) instead of a function. Grrr.

PS: Why? Because functions should not have side-effects (in a language like
Ada). I don't care about expediencies that are to do with debugging,
profiling, auditing, and that sort of thing (where the effort of not using
functions would be silly), but where the main thrust of the logic has a side
effect, use a procedure! Good programming (in Ada) is not about what weird
and funny things you can do that will catch people by surpise (and so be
likely to cause bugs, or angst, or both).

PPS: I don't think allocating an RNG state block on the heap, rather than
the stack, is likely to have much effect on speed; surely the burden of
indirect access would be vastly outweighed by the burden of computation for
each number generation cycle? And why would using finalisation be
inefficient?

--
Nick Roberts