Pd Schloss wrote: > > I'm reviewing a perl script that someone wrote to do a statistical > analysis. I know it's bad form, but I was wondering if anyone knows > what the default seed is for the random number generator in Perl. They > haven't seeded it with "srand" - what does this do? It still seems to > pick random numbers, any ideas?
Hi. I wrote this back in March. I assume I was right :) Rob Dixon wrote: > > Interesting. Digging into the code for Perl v5.6.1, 'srand' will try to read four > bytes from the /dev/urandom device. If that fails, then it will read the current > time of day and mix it up with the PID, a Perl stack pointer and a few arbitrary > constants. So, as it should be, there is no 'default' seed. This probably doesn't help, but at least should end your search! Cheers, Rob -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
