Re: random doesn't feel very random

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Paul Eggert writes:
 > On 08/24/2012 12:03 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
 > > That doesn't mean there are no such experts among Emacs developers,
 > > it just means I haven't seen anybody display appropriate credentials
 > > on emacs-devel.
 > 
 > I'm not sure what you mean by "credentials".

That doesn't really matter.  The point is what the credentials are
for.  I wrote:

    Even using /dev/urandom to generate the seed would be overkill in
    almost all applications, and I wouldn't trust anybody in Emacs to
    write code for an application that needs that level of randomness.

You see, I'm not talking about credentials for *implementing* a
(P)RNG, I'm talking about *using* it.  I'm saying that if you *need* a
(P)RNG of that quality, nobody I know could write the rest of the
application in Emacs Lisp and be sure it's as good as the (P)RNG is.

That doesn't mean there's anything *wrong* with implementing a better
PRNG for Lisp.  But I personally wouldn't bother.  random(3) is plenty
good enough for me.