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From: jfjr@mitre-bedford.arpa (Freedman)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: random numbers,vaxes, and unix
Message-ID: <8472@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 25-Jul-87 12:20:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-adm.8472
Posted: Sat Jul 25 12:20:55 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 26-Jul-87 01:45:18 EDT
Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA
Lines: 19


  A few years ago I read a paper about writing a "good" random
number generator for a PC. I liked what I saw and wrote it (in
fortran) for a Vax 780 running VMS 3.whatever. The basic idea was
to use the supplied generator to  generate 4 bytes of random
1's and 0's then sort of glue them together with appropriate
adjustments to make a floating point number (0,1). I had
to make some adjustment because the floating point format (IEEE)
described in the article did not quite match the format used
in the Vax. Does that problem still exist? it should be easy
to do in C but will I stumble on the fact that C does its
real number computations in double? I am running on a Vax 8600 (Ultrix)



Jerry Freedman, Jr      "As you wander through life
jfjr@mitre-bedford.arpa   Whatever be your goal
(617)271-6248 or 7555    Keep your eye upon the doughnut
                          and not on the hole"