[Remind-Fans] Getting reminders at random

Neal Fultz nfultz at gmail.com
Mon Mar 30 01:19:24 EDT 2020


I've added a new function to remind to call the C RNG, to be reminded of
things at a random date. I guess someone else asked about this in 2001?

Anyway, patch is here:
https://github.com/nfultz/remind/compare/nfultz/randint.patch

Please feel free to add it to the official release (or not, it's a little
buggy).

Here is how it works in practice:

nfultz at neal-nuc:Remind$cat test.rem
REM  MSG '[randint(10)]' '[randint(10,20)]'%
REM  [randint(28)] MSG random day of month%
REM  SATISFY [randint(7) == $Tw] MSG random day of week.%
nfultz at neal-nuc:Remind$src/remind -n test.rem
2020/03/30 '3' '19'
2020/04/20 random day of month
2020/04/11 random day of week.
nfultz at neal-nuc:Remind$src/remind -n test.rem
2020/03/30 '4' '20'
2020/04/23 random day of month
2020/04/01 random day of week.

I don't quite get why 4/11 would be chosen by SATISFY in the first run,
wouldn't 4/4 be the next Saturday? Perhaps the expression is reevaluated
and advancing the RNG, iterating past 4/4 and essentially doing rejection
sampling with p=1/7 ? Could be a defect in my implementation of randint, or
my understanding of SATISFY.

Anyways, thanks for the very useful program.

vr

Neal
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