I trust this would become no more than a non-default option, selectable at run-time.
A consistently-used pseudo-random number generator (even not a very good one), is useful insofar as one can rerun sequences by starting with the same seed; for debugging (as in replicating a problem) if nothing else. Not to mention games like freecell that use the seed to represent a particular hand. What I think I'd like as much as what you describe is the option of using a better pseudo-random number generator; lrand48() comes to mind as both better and reasonably widely available. Both of those might be useful as options, but the current behavior should certainly remain the default. Finding a widely available _and_ thread-safe (on all platforms) pseudo-random number generator might get interesting... This message posted from opensolaris.org
