On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, Mark-Jason Dominus wrote:
> And the problem you describe is not really a problem. There has never
> been any guarantee that a program would produce the same sequence of
> random numbers after a change to the Perl binary.
> random numbers after a change to the Perl binary. More recent
> versions of Perl use random() or drand48() if they are available,
Well, there effectively was such a guarantee for perl1.000 ..
perl5.005_03. The drand48() change went in with 5.6.0. This was actually
a very big issue for me. I put loud warnings into perldelta.pod and
Jarkko and I put hooks into Configure to enable users to preserve the old
pre-5.6.0 behavior if necessary.
Further, we might eventually want to include our own PRNG into perl6
anyway, if only to work around the really lousy one commonly encountered
on Win32.
Still, even for me, I have never encountered a case where I wanted to
maintain the same rand() sequence and also use a one-arg crypt().
> I will add a note aboput this to the RFC. If there are no other
> comments, I will freeze it in 24 hours.
I agree this is a non-issue for this RFC.[*]
--
Andy Dougherty [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dept. of Physics
Lafayette College, Easton PA 18042
[*] I'm assuming we'll leave the salt example in the documentation, and
that anyone sophisticated enough to rely on getting repeatable values from
rand() can also use the example from perlfunc.
