random() error in Turbo C++

Henry Spencer henry at zoo.toronto.edu
Mon Sep 10 08:45:36 AEST 1990


In article <DAVEG.90Sep9012053 at near.cs.caltech.edu> daveg at near.cs.caltech.edu (Dave Gillespie) writes:
>Sometimes rand() will tweak its results to be less blatantly bad
>in the low bits, but every one I've seen was ultimately linear
>congruential.

The original Unix rand() did a 32-bit calculation internally and returned
the HIGH-order 16 bits.  Unfortunately, certain idiots porting the system
to 32-bit machines wanted a 32-bit rand() and didn't bother understanding
why it was done the way it was...
-- 
TCP/IP: handling tomorrow's loads today| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
OSI: handling yesterday's loads someday|  henry at zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry



More information about the Comp.lang.c mailing list