Follow Benford's law for finance amounts.

[RelatedTitle]

Clear and concise description of the problem

Currently, the amount's first digits are uniformly distributed (each digit having ~11.11% probability). In the real world, however, this is rarely the case, especially for financial data. This is what Benford's law demonstrates. The actual distribution is as follows.

Digit	Probability
1	30.1%
2	17.6%
3	12.5%
4	9.7%
5	7.9%
6	6.7%
7	5.8%
8	5.1%
9	4.6%

The current implementation, although more random, is less realistic.

I am planning to submit a PR for this issue if accepted.

Suggested solution

Implementing an RNG function that follows Benford's law would provide more realistic data.

Alternative

No response

Additional context

No response

[Shinigami92]

I somehow like this idea 🤔 it would also improve finance.amount, as now it's somewhat just a wrapper around datatype.number + a currency symbol.
But this would also need good documentation.

Another team member should also accept this proposal and then you can start 🙂

[RelatedTitle]

I was wondering if this were to be accepted, how should something like this be approached. Should it be a "datatype" like datatype.number() or a helper function, or something else?

[ST-DDT]

I also like the idea, but currently I'm not sure where to put it.
On one hand I would like to have all numbers behave like this, on the other hand some methods just use the number method for index lookups, so any bias there would be detrimental.

I think datatype.benfordNumber or something similar might be useful.
(We might later shift it - along with other methods - to a new and separate number module though).
Lets wait a day or two for additional input, so we don't have to refactor the method/code later.

[RelatedTitle]

I was also thinking, should it have min/max values? There could be an issue, for example, using 2000 as minimum and 5000 as maximum, because it couldn't possibly follow Benford's law that way. Should the params be limited to the number of digits to be generated?

[ST-DDT]

I have to think about it some more.
min, max, precision vs integerDigits, decimalDigits 🤔

I'm also torn between using an options object or not. Especially for the later variant.

[Shinigami92]

Oh I thought we just replace the implementation of finance.amount and change its behaviour 🤔