[metapost] Re: a "randomseed" workaround

[Taco Hoekwater]

Larry Siebenmann wrote:
> Hi Carl,
> 
>  > Another item for Taco, I guess -- seems like that should be easily
>  > changeable.  All current os's supply time in seconds at least, not to
>  > mention milliseconds or microseconds.
> 
> Yes,  all current os's.

All web2c-based distros, as well as most commercial ones I know of,
already use gettimeofday() if and when that is avaible. And any
system that does not have that, is very unlikely to have something
even newer like /dev/random.

As I said before, my advise to Larry is to get a current distribution.

Please keep in mind that from the Pascal Web source's point of view,
this is totally a "system dependant" thing. The best we can do is 
explicitly add a remark to that effect in the source code. It will
always be up to the distributor to implement something that is
more random than time().


Greetings, Taco