RE: Re: A proposal:xsl:result-document asynchronous at

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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