Hi all,
On Tue, 19 Sep 2000, Ime Smits wrote:
> It's not the first time I hear that playing around with srand is
> bad, even perlfunc mentions that. Can anybody explain to me the
> reason?
It's staggeringly difficult to generate a truly random number using a
computer. People go to conferences about it. Same problem with White
Noise, which was more in my field when I was in that field. It always
turns out some shade of pink. No kidding.
So the reason is that if somebody has done a truckload of work to
produce a function which does something approximating to the job, then
all you're going to do if you fiddle with it is make it worse.
On the other hand if you don't want all your Apache children to start
with the same seed, I think you're probably justified in changing the
seed. That's what it's for.
73,
Ged.
