It would be really helpful if Appendix A included sample code for those PRNO 
programming notes, along with sample code for selecting random integers as 
suggested in Appendix A of the NIST document referred to in PoOP note 18 in 
section "Other Publications" here:

http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP.800-90Ar1.pdf

Along with lots of other "hard core" programming examples that have never been 
provided, especially in the multiprogramming area.

<rant>
Based on the lack of "hard core" examples, one could think that they don't want 
non-IBM programmers to actually learn to use this stuff.  OCO rules?
</rant>

It's fun learning on your own, it's just harder than it needs to be without 
good examples.

Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List [mailto:[email protected]] On 
Behalf Of Dan Greiner
Sent: Saturday, September 23, 2017 1:04 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: z14 PoO Available

A bit of history here:  

When PERFORM PSEUDORANDOM NUMBER OPERATION was first being developed circa 
2012, (a) pseudorandom was hyphenated (improperly ... it's really a single 
word), and (b) the proposed mnemonic was initially PPRNO, but shortened to 
PRNO. One of the firmware developers was concerned that — when pronounced aloud 
— PRNO sounded too suggestive for a conservative mainframe company, so we 
relented and called it PPNO. (Similar sensitivity training applied to the 
mnemonic for COMPARE LOGICAL IMMEDIATE AND TRAP and others.)

With the addition of the message-security-assist extension 7, where the 
instruction can now produce either deterministic or true random numbers, we 
decided that the risqué mnemonic was more appropriate (and the firmware 
developer had overcome his initial concerns). So now, we're back to PRNO. 

Note Well: As suggested by programming note 4.a (p. 7-358) , PRNO-TRNG is not 
the swiftest operation in the instruction set. Programming notes 4.b. and 4.c 
suggest periodically using PRNO-TRNG to re-seed a deterministic random number 
generator (the frequency of such re-seeding based on the durability of the DRNG 
function). 

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