Bug 17068 – Range-based seeding of MersenneTwisterEngine is inconsistent with C++11

Created attachment 1631 Small example of range-based seeding of Phobos Mersenne Twister std.random's `MersenneTwisterEngine` includes a `seed` method that accepts an input range from which the state of the generator can be initialized. This method superficially seems similar to the sequence-based seeding mechanism that can be used when seeding the C++11 <random> `mt19937` engine, but its behaviour is different in several ways: * the Phobos method will reject any range whose length is less than the size of the generator's internal state array. By contrast the C++11 `mt19937` accepts a seed sequence of any length (including 1); * seeding with identical sequences produces completely different results for the C++11 and D versions. Besides simply being inconsistent (and probably also at odds with reference seeding methods for the Mersenne Twister) this may make it harder for users to port C++ code to D. It is therefore suggested to implement a new range-based seeding mechanism that matches the C++11 seed-sequence behaviour, and deprecate the old seeding method.

Created attachment 1632 Small example of sequence-based seeding of C++11 Mersenne Twister Compile with the `-std=c++11` option.

I've attached small code snippets to show the difference between the D and C++11 behaviour. Running these on my machine the D code outputs (apart from the seed data) 1st and 10,000th variates of: 596004846 703773746 while the C++11 code outputs 1st and 10,000th variates of: 719125747 99701347

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