This functionality is not super-core and so doesn't need to be included
in std. It's possible that std may need rand (it does a little bit now,
for io::test) in which case the functionality required could be moved to
a secret hidden module and reexposed by librand.
Unfortunately, using #[deprecated] here is hard: there's too much to
mock to make it feasible, since we have to ensure that programs still
typecheck to reach the linting phase.
The code was using (in the notation of Doornik 2005) `f(x_{i+1}) -
f(x_{i+2})` rather than `f(x_i) - f(x_{i+1})`. This corrects that, and
removes the F_DIFF tables which caused this problem in the first place.
They `F_DIFF` tables are a micro-optimisation (in theory, they could
easily be a micro-pessimisation): that `if` gets hit about 1% of the
time for Exp/Normal, and the rest of the condition involves RNG calls
and a floating point `exp`, so it is unlikely that saving a single FP
subtraction will be very useful (especially as more tables means more
memory reads and higher cache pressure, as well as taking up space in
the binary (although only ~2k in this case)).
Closes#10084. Notably, unlike that issue suggests, this wasn't a
problem with the Exp tables. It affected Normal too, but since it is
symmetric, there was no bias in the mean (as the bias was equal on the
positive and negative sides and so cancelled out) but it was visible as
a variance slightly lower than it should be.