🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <483@keele.keele.ac.uk> writes:

>My problem is that C has the two routines srand and rand. The latter
>returning an integer in the range 0-32767 (0 -> (2^15)-1). If I am

C has no such thing.  UNIX has such things.  Rand and srand are outdated
relics of the PDP-11 era, and have been replaced on almost all (?) UNIX
systems by random and srandom, which return 32-bit values.  If your UNIX
system supports these, use them and avoid the problem!

In any case, even on 32-bit UNIX machines when called from C, rand returns
random values only in the 16 high-order bits, so when using these functions
even from C it is necessary to do a 16-bit shift to the "right".  Without
this, the sequence of numbers returned alternates strictly between even
and odd (at least it did on a VAX running ULTRIX) -- scarcely pseudorandom
behavior!

	-P.
************************f*u*cn*rd*ths*u*cn*gt*a*gd*jb**************************
Peter S. Shenkin, Department of Chemistry, Barnard College, New York, NY  10027
(212)854-1418  shenkin@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu(Internet)  shenkin@cunixc(Bitnet)
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