Paul Sanchez wrote:

> The thing I WOULD like to see is Ruby's generator wrapped up as a class 
> which provides separate, independent random stream objects.  That would 
> enable Ruby to be used for serious simulation work.[**]

I'll second that. Independent PRNG streams are very important in the 
simulation work I do. I am currently using the PRNG from Numerical 
Recipes, but it's not as good as MT19937 (Mersenne Twister), which is 
what Ruby uses for #rand(). Also, you can't distribute the NR source to 
people who don't have the NR license, whereas MT has a BS-style license, 
now.

The drawback of MT might be the memory requirements of the generator 
state, which is 624+ bytes.

One of these days, I'll wrap up an extension for multiple MT19937 streams.