Gnat Chat, Random Numbers in GNAT

[xanthian@well.com (Kent Paul Dolan)]

Aside:

I realize this should go to the Gnat Chat mailing list, but I'm on too
many mailing lists as it is, so my first question is, would it be
appropriate, and would there be any interest in or support for moving
Gnat Chat to a new leaf of comp.lang.ada?  I'm assuming without
evidence that the level of traffic would justify a newsgroup, and I
much prefer newsgroup threading to mailing list linearity.

If several anyones encourage me quite a bit, and no furor of protest
emerges, I'd do a newsgroup RFD to make comp.lang.ada into
comp.lang.ada.*, but I'd like before going to the four months of
trouble that would take to find out if there would be any interest in a
split, and if so along what lines people would like to see things
divided.  I will confess in advance that there is nothing that
overwhelming about the traffic in comp.lang.ada, I just like more
neatly sorted out conversations.

Whatever.

On to my main agenda.

I want to do some genetic algorithm (GA) programming in GNAT, to do
proof of concept for some new approaches I've been mulling to speed up
convergence and remove the need for sorts, and I need to know about the
kind and quality of the Ada.Numerics.Float_Random implementation in
GNAT, to decide whether I can trust it to work well in a statistical
distribution sense when called (probably) hundreds of millions of times
in a single program run (you may guess that I have abundant cpu cycles
at work, and you'd be correct, at least 15 machines behind our firewall
sit mostly idle for good reason that my using them for week long low
priority GA runs wouldn't impact significantly).

Header excerpts from the source, from someone who knows right where to
look, so I don't have to slog through it from a zero knowledge starting
point, would be a perfectly fine answer, if the info is there.  Formal
pseudorandom number generator test reports of whatever style have
become popular since I was last doing that kind of quality control
personally back in the sixties would be good.  Anecdotal personal
experience is also welcome as an answer.  URLs pointing to any of the
non-source code information would be equally useful.

Thanks for any help.  I read and archive this newsgroup daily, so an
email response is welcome, but not necessary.

--
Kent Paul Dolan.
<xanthian@well.com> <xanthian@aztec.asu.edu> <xanthian@whistle.com>