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From: David Bernier <david250@videotron.ca>
Newsgroups: sci.math,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.fortran,comp.lang.pl1,comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: KISS4691, a potentially top-ranked RNG.
Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2011 21:50:54 -0400
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Xref: g2news2.google.com sci.math:234211 comp.lang.c:126613
 comp.lang.fortran:41255 comp.lang.pl1:2416 comp.lang.ada:20049
Date: 2011-04-28T21:50:54-04:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

e p chandler wrote:
>
>
> "robin" wrote in message
>
> | So, what is all this? In particular, is there something special about
> | the value of 3.7 billion?
>
>> No, nothing special at all.
>> The purpose of the exercise is just to confirm that after generating
>> 1000000000 random numbers, you get the same answer as George does.
>
> Alas, I think you are making some strong assumptions about the state of
> computing in the hereafter.
>

All we have now are George Marsaglia's posts and writings.
I know there's now a move on the way to 64-bit processors,
which I take to mean the x86_64 or AMD64 design/instruction set.

In any case, with an executable compiled with a C compiler,
there's the function sizeof, which might be useful
in some cases at run time.

For example, one could add to main() in C :

printf("the size of an unsigned long in bytes is %d\n", sizeof(unsigned long));

There's also the Itanium architecture and others, and even with a known
processor, some compiler flags affect the number of bytes for
some data types, such as "long double" with the -m64 flag
on Fujitsu SPARC IV with Sun Solaris (--> 16 byte long
doubles with the -m64 flag).

AFAIK, sizeof(unsigned long) can be relied upon to give the size
in 8-bit bytes of a C "unsigned long".

Perhaps some documentation of language, machine, compiler, compiler
options examples where KISS4691 works as per the Marsaglia
specs could be helpful as a reference ...

David Bernier

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