At Tuesday, 11 March 2003, you wrote:
I wonder what we can do about random number generation.
I think the simplest solution for most use cases involving random
numbers is a function that permutes a supplied sequence into random
order:
Simplest is usually best (thank you for not picking 0.0 to 1.0 :-)
but the moment we do this we'll get every statistician interested:
<xsl:for-each select="uniform(1 to 52)">
...
</xsl:for-each>
Or normal(1 to 52)? poisson(1 to 52)? lognormal(1 to 52) :-)
To select 1000 people chosen at random:
<xsl:for-each select="subsequence(random(//person), 1, 1000)">
...
</xsl:for-each>
People are easy: sort alpha by forename then surname. That's
usually pretty random, then pick every Nth entry.
///Peter
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