How do I get random #s?

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <16034 at tiger.oxy.edu> bagpiper at oxy.edu (Michael Paul Hunter) writes:
>How about a quick hack at a random number generator that is
>kindof-fairly uniorm in [0, 1].  My quick answer is to scale
>rand...but that doesn't seem to be the best quick hack answer
>to me.

I think it is.  If you really need extremely good random deviates
then you have a lot of research and hard work to do.

Before somebody mentions the recent CACM article, let me denounce
it as not contributing significantly to this subject.

By the way, I find that [0,1) (i.e. including 0 but excluding 1)
is a more useful range.  The obvious implementation using the
previously-posted my_rand() is:

	extern int my_rand();  /* uniform integer in [0,32767] */
	double my_unif() { return my_rand() / 32768.0; }  /* [0.0,1.0) */