On 13 November 2016 at 16:50, Apostolos Syropoulos <asyropou...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > OK please let me know how the pdftex thing is implemented and I will do the > thing with drand48. Then people can check the implementation, etc. > > A.S. > People using a fixed seed to get reproducible results would not be well served by a change in the random number generator. Just because something would be easy to change doesn't mean that change is always a good idea. A document using a fixed seed would have been generating reproducible results with pdftex since these functions were added more than ten years ago. Changing the source isn't the issue, are you offering also to help with user support to manage the change and explain to people why it's not possible to re-create documents that they created before they updated their tex system? That said, if you want to look, the version in pdftex is @* \[7b] Random numbers. starting at line 2507 of source/texk/web2c/pdftexdir/pdftex.web Sometimes change is necessary but here it really isn't clear that the statistical properties of drand48 are superior to Knuth's algorithm from metafont (I've never seen any comparison of these, only between drand48 and C rand) Or whether any of these algorithms have any real flaws when used with sequence lengths of the sort realistically practical in a tex document. David -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex