Re: Improve `seed->random-state' in stable-2.0?

[Andy Wingo]

On Fri 20 Jan 2012 04:28, Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> writes:

> `seed->random-state' is poorly implemented when passed a numeric
> argument.  It converts the number to a decimal string, and then
> `scm_i_init_rstate' takes over and basically adds every 8th byte
> together to form the 64-bit internal state.

Is that what it does?

I agree that it's a pretty bad initializer to a pretty bad PRNG, but
from what I can tell, it does use all of the bytes in the input.  They
aren't very dense bytes, entropy-wise, but there are more of them, so I
think the amount of entropy added to the seed is the same.

Dunno.  Am I reading that code wrong?

Regards,

Andy
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