On Thu, 2005-03-17 at 18:06 -0600, Rod Adams wrote: First off, thanks for the reply. Very nice work you're doing!
> I'll listen to proposals about how to support better randoms. For now I > think C<rand> is a standard PRNG. Yes, absolutely. If I gave a contrary impression, I did not mean to. I think it's important for lots of historical reasons to have a repeatable (and hopefully somewhat standard) PRNG. I was saying that it would be a very nice thing if, come Perl 6, I did not have to write hairy code that checks for a module, and fails over to home-baked, OS- specific ways of getting "good" random data. This is a SEPARATE need from the need for a repeatable, standard PRNG, and should always operate off of the best source of entropy available to the program. Right now, that's /dev/urandom (for non-blocking hybridized entropy pool + PRNG) under most Unix variants and something like Math::TrulyRandom's setjmp/longjmp hack elsewhere. Speaking of which, there's a good reason to keep those two when you get to them ;-) One solution would be to adapt M::TR to Perl 6, and just pull it into the core. I'm just saying that it's a wide-spread need among a vast array of different applications (crypto, games, statistics, etc), and it makes sense to "corize" it.
