[Bug 20573] Random generator in XPath

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=20573

--- Comment #3 from Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> ---
The WG reviewed this on 2014-04-29 and there was sentiment in favour of finding
a solution, provided the resulting function was purely deterministic and did
not rely on hidden state. The EXSLT proposal was examined; it was recognized
that having a fixed-length sequence of random numbers to play with created
usability problems. On the other hand a mechanism that only generates a single
random number from a seed has the difficulty (or at least danger) of going into
a closed loop. Michael Sperberg-McQueen suggested a function

random-number-generator(seed) which returns a composite value (array or map)
containing (a) the next random number in the sequence, and (b) a function to
step this along. We would need to construct some examples to see how usable
this is.

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Received on Tuesday, 29 April 2014 17:42:35 UTC