Re: Gnat Chat, Random Numbers in GNAT

[Robert Iredell Eachus <rieachus@earthlink.net>]

Kent Paul Dolan wrote:

> One can only hope that will be fixed _real soon now_; that's a pretty terrible
> misfeature.

    Not really, the limit is actually to Standard.Integer seeds, so it will
automagically grow to 64 bits in a few years.   But notice that the generator can
contain much more state, this is just a limit on the number of starting points.
The caution here was that you could easily exceed 2**32 entities in your GA run.
Once you do, you may see no new behavior.  By limiting the number of generators to
one per thread, you go up to ~2**49 starting states for entities.

    And incidently, the generator does go to some work so that sequential starting
values will produce uncorrelated sequences, even right at the start.  This allows
you to write Reset(Generator(N), Seed+N); or some such.