On Thu, Nov 7, 2019 at 7:11 AM Wolfgang Brehm via Std-Proposals <
std-proposals_at_[hidden]> wrote:

>
> I recently found std::sample and thought it would be nice to have to have
> an analogous sample view which samples from a population without repetition
> - with repetition is so trivial that we can ignore it for now.
>
> What do you think about a sample view that accepts a range and a random
> generator and returns a range which can be iterated over to access the
> elements of the input range in a random order evaluating a bijective
> (perfect and minimal) hash function to generate random indices without
> repetition?
>

IIUC, what you're describing is a "shuffle_view", not a "sample_view" — but
you could generate a random sample by piping it into
ranges::views::take(k). Is that right?

    std::vector<int> inputs {3,1,4,1,5,9,2,6,5};
    std::mt19937 g;
    std::vector<int> three_random_digits = std::move(inputs) |
my::shuffle_view(g) | ranges::views::take(3) | ranges::to<std::vector>();


I'd be interested what you think and volunteer to write a sample
> implementation if there is interest - I am using similar ideas in my own
> code, but you know how it is, it's not pretty.
>

A reference implementation should *always* precede any effort at
standardization. The goal of standardization should be *standardization*,
not *innovation*. We standardize paper sizes and screw head designs for
interoperability ("portability"); the general notions of "paper" and
"screws" themselves should precede standardization efforts and should not
need any push from a standards body to become widespread.
</rant>

It might be useful to get a reference implementation of your idea up on
GitHub. Have you looked into contributing it to any popular implementation,
such as Eric Niebler's Range-v3 <https://github.com/ericniebler/range-v3>
or Jonathan Boccara's Pipes <https://github.com/joboccara/pipes>? (If
you're aiming to get it into std::ranges, Range-v3 would be the relevant
target. However, prematurely tying yourself to std::ranges might be as bad
for innovation as prematurely tying yourself to iostreams or std::pmr.)

HTH,
–Arthur