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generators and endian [from thread on address@hidden


From: Paul Kienzle
Subject: generators and endian [from thread on address@hidden
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 19:36:07 -0400


On Mar 22, 2007, at 1:55 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

On 22-Mar-2007, David Bateman wrote:

| I'd say the option 3) is probably the best, but means the old generators
| won't generator the same sequence as previously on big-endian
| machines... Is this an issue?

I think it is probably more important for Octave generate the same
sequence for a given seed on both big and little endian systems than
to preserve some old (and possibly even buggy) behavior.

This presents an excellent opportunity to toss the old generators,
at least on big-endian machines.  Any reason to keep them?

How much effort is it worth to guarantee that randn and other
derived generators produce the same sequence?  The vagaries
of the optimizer may mean that guard bits allow one threshold
test to pass on some versions of the compiler but not in others.
Should we force numbers to memory to clear the guard?

- Paul



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