Re: Better name for method Randomizer::nextFloat()

Hi On 10/15/23 02:04, tag Knife wrote:

I think the major pet peeve i have is that the "Randomizer" class is encapsulating all random functions. I would like to see each randomizer have its own class, since they are under the Random namespace anyway, I believe they should be Random/StringRandomizer, Random/IntRandomizer, Random/FloatRandomizer, so on so forth. Basically Ramdom/{Type}Randomizer. This would also allow more granular and specific functionality for each type. For example, for this discussion, the class, Random/FloatRandomizer (and IntRandomizer) could be instatiated with its boundries.

$randomFloat = new Random/FloatRandomizer($lowerBound, $upperBound,
$boundryInterval)
$a = $randomFloat->get();
$b = $randomFLoat->next();

Is that not more intuitive?

Creating a separate class for each possible distribution would certainly be the cleanest API from an "academic" point of view. I'm not sure if it would be more intuitive, but I'm sure that it would not be easier to use. The API of Random\Randomizer is probably not perfect, but I believe it does quite a few things quite right: - It is secure by default, if you do not provide an engine, it defaults to the CSPRNG. - It is discoverable, your IDE will autocomplete the available methods and all the methods are listed right beneath each other in the documentation. - It is succinct for common cases and (mostly) does what it says on the tin. - It allows you to easily build additional (userland) APIs on top of it, thus serving as a "building block" (to reuse the phrasing from the Randomizer additions RFC). Such a userland API could look like the API you proposed (though it would probably make sense to also include the "Uniform" somewhere within the name, because you could also have a "Normal" distribution, so we're right in bike-shedding territory, API design is hard). To give an example:

    // Inspired by Rust's API.
    $engine = new \Random\Engine\Secure();
    $oneToHundred = new \Random\Distribution\UniformInt(1, 100);
    $randomInt = $oneToHundred($engine);
    $anotherRandomInt = $oneToHundred($engine);

vs

    // The default PHP API.
    $randomizer = new \Random\Randomizer();
    $randomInt = $randomizer->getInt(1, 100);
    $anotherRandomInt = $randomizer->getInt(1, 100);

I would certainly prefer PHP's API for most of my applications, because it's much less boilerplate. It also avoids constructing many short-lived objects [1]: You can just throw both the Engine and Randomizer into your dependency injection container. Best regards Tim Düsterhus [1] I expect the performance impact of constructing and destructing objects to be greater than a regular function call, but might be wrong here.