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From: trh@ukc.ac.uk (T.R.Hopkins)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: randu?
Message-ID: <292@re.ukc.ac.uk>
Date: 1 Mar 91 13:26:47 GMT
References: <62349@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <17397@milton.u.washington.edu>
Reply-To: trh@ukc.ac.uk (T.R.Hopkins)
Organization: Computing Lab, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK.
Lines: 20

In article <17397@milton.u.washington.edu> seymour@milton.u.washington.edu (Richard Seymour) writes:
>What about RANDU?
><my comments in "<...>" brackets>
>source: vax fortran user's guide, aa-d035c-te, for vms v3.0, fort v3.0)
>page D-12  "Compatibility: VAX-11 Fortran and PDP-11  Fortran"
>
>D.3.9  RANDU subroutine
>The RANDU subroutine computes a pseudorandom numvber as a single-precision
>value uniformly distributed in the range:  0.0 .LE. value .LT. 1.0


Is this the dreaded randu described on p104 of Don Knuth's Semi-numerical
Algorithms as "regrettably, the generator that has actually been used on 
such machines (System/370) in most of the world's scientific computing
centres for about a decade; its very name RANDU is enough to bring dismay
into the eyes and stomachs of many computer scientists! .... the generator
fails most 3-dimensional criteria for randomness, and it should never have
been used."

Tim