From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Oct 7 10:54:28 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id KAA14233 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 7 Oct 1996 10:54:28 -0700 (PDT) Received: from irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de (irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de [141.76.1.11]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id KAA14227 for ; Mon, 7 Oct 1996 10:54:19 -0700 (PDT) Received: from sax.sax.de (sax.sax.de [193.175.26.33]) by irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de (8.6.12/8.6.12-s1) with ESMTP id TAA04515 for ; Mon, 7 Oct 1996 19:54:12 +0200 Received: (from uucp@localhost) by sax.sax.de (8.6.12/8.6.12-s1) with UUCP id TAA13206 for freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org; Mon, 7 Oct 1996 19:54:11 +0200 Received: (from j@localhost) by uriah.heep.sax.de (8.7.5/8.6.9) id TAA15133 for freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org; Mon, 7 Oct 1996 19:52:33 +0200 (MET DST) From: J Wunsch Message-Id: <199610071752.TAA15133@uriah.heep.sax.de> Subject: Re: I plan to change random() for -current (was Re: rand() and random()) To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD hackers) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 19:52:33 +0200 (MET DST) In-Reply-To: from Richard Wackerbarth at "Oct 7, 96 05:32:46 am" X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL17 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk As Richard Wackerbarth wrote: > I think that Terry pointed to the proper approach -- it is permissable, and > perhaps desirable, to generate a NEW function. It is not acceptable, for > historical compatability reasons, to CHANGE an existing one. The requirements for rand() are being set straight in the ANSI and ISO documents. There are no implementation details, and i don't see why we are obligued to keep a buggy implementation just since some people on the earth might be used to this one. If some particular package relies on the pseudo-unrandomness of a particular implementation, they should ship this particular implementation along with their sources (and give it a name that doesn't clash with the standard). There's nothing more they could expect from a standard-conforming implementation than to conform to the standard. We've already got a new function, and the original complaint was that the requirement to use this new function just in order to get reasonable behaviour as suggested by a standard basically defeats the entire idea of that standard. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)