Re: preliminary patch for zsh/random module

[Clinton Bunch <cdb_zsh@zentaur.org>]

On 10/23/2022 9:01 PM, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 22, 2022 at 8:44 PM Clinton Bunch <cdb_zsh@zentaur.org> wrote:
>> It still needs testing on more platforms and additional error-checking
>> as well as documentation, but I was hoping for some feedback on the
>> general ideas.
> Silly nits:
> * Typo in the introductory comment.
I'm pretty sure I've since found and changed all the instances of 
Zoltan's name.
> * Indentation is funny, it looks like you may have used tab width
> other than 8 characters, which is the standard for zsh C code.  (Or
> just never use tabs to indent.)
Blame notepad.  Thunderbird doesn't allow me to attach inline, so I had 
to open in Notepad and cut-n-paste.  I didn't notice until after I sent 
it, how bad the indentation got messed up.
> * There should be spaces on either side of assignment "=" signs.  You
> haven't been consistent.
I think I fixed all those.  I haven't been consistent because it seems 
unnatural to me.  Waste of line width.
>
> Aside to -workers:  It's probably time to remove Zoltan's name from
> the copyright notices ... or more likely, to specify that the authors
> of new files should replace his name with their own name there.
>
> Actual question:  What's the use case for returning or printing a
> block of random bytes?  Why does this need to be a builtin?
Mostly because I see constructs like read -k6 -u3 3</dev/urandom, also 
it would be nice to initialize an array with random numbers without 
having to use a loop to access SRANDOM n times.
>
> Suggestion:  Treat SRANDOM like SECONDS, in that you can change the
> type from integer to floating-point.  Then maybe the zrandom() math
> function isn't needed?
That would seem confusing to me, and too easy to forget which state you 
left it in. zrandom was meant to be a replacement for rand48
>