[lug] Platform independent randomness

[Ken Weinert]

* Ed Hill (ed at eh3.com) [011130 06:06]:
> Hi Ken,
> 
> Heres part of a code that I wrote some years ago that does exactly
> what you want.  You'll have to strip out the Tracer() junk (easily
> done) and some other stuff but it should be trivial to convert it
> from C++ into a C code snippet (very portable).
> 
> I'll be happy to help if you need it...
> 
> Ed
> 
> ps - As a bonus the r250 algo has a very long period which made it 
> 
>      good for Monte Carlo methods...  whatever...  ;-)

	Since Ed was kind enough to include code I gave this one a try
first.

	I bastardized it down to C with a couple of changes in the
public functions to ensure that the initialization gets called even if
the user doesn't do it and made the internal functions static - it was
easy code to understand and change - and it works out of the
box. Repeatable sequences on the platforms that matter.

	Thanks a lot - I'm still not sure why the changes I was making
in the previous code I was using didn't work, but that's a lower
priority to track down now. Now on to bigger and better things,
mucking about with PDF file internals.

	Oh, for the curious, this code is used in part of a PDF
process - our documents have 16 char identifiers and I am creating an
8 char owner password out of the doc id. It's nice to be able to
reliably generate the password on multiple platforms :)

-- 
Ken Weinert   kenw at ihs.com 303-858-6956 (V) 303-705-4258 (F)
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