Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!ukma!rutgers!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: How do I get random #s?
Message-ID: <9600@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 6 Feb 89 17:01:05 GMT
References: <19415@dhw68k.cts.com> <9570@smoke.BRL.MIL> <16034@tiger.oxy.edu>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 18

In article <16034@tiger.oxy.edu> bagpiper@oxy.edu (Michael Paul Hunter) writes:
>How about a quick hack at a random number generator that is
>kindof-fairly uniorm in [0, 1].  My quick answer is to scale
>rand...but that doesn't seem to be the best quick hack answer
>to me.

I think it is.  If you really need extremely good random deviates
then you have a lot of research and hard work to do.

Before somebody mentions the recent CACM article, let me denounce
it as not contributing significantly to this subject.

By the way, I find that [0,1) (i.e. including 0 but excluding 1)
is a more useful range.  The obvious implementation using the
previously-posted my_rand() is:

	extern int my_rand();  /* uniform integer in [0,32767] */
	double my_unif() { return my_rand() / 32768.0; }  /* [0.0,1.0) */