On Jun 11, 2007, at 8:33 PM, Andy wrote:
"Jos Hickson" <jos.hickson@gmail.com> wrote in news:fc03d05a0706060823v59628c64xd1bcda61e9fd5f48@mail.gmail.com:
On 06/06/07, Peter Dimov <pdimov@mmltd.net> wrote:
Jos Hickson wrote:
On 05/06/07, Peter Dimov <pdimov@mmltd.net> wrote:
[snip] ... and if Engine is a template parameter, we probably need to support engines that only take a 32 bit seed anyway.
Isn't it the case that the maximum seed size is related (equal?) to the difference between the max and min values produced by a particular engine and also that all the engines in Boost Random provide the iterator version of seed?
The seed for mt19937 is 624 words. Aah, a bit bigger then!
I have been thinking about this for awhile now, and maybe I should use Peter's suggestion and only support random number generators that can be seeded with a single number. And xor with rd_.
Please don't! As mentioned before that would only give 2^32 different UUIDs. The best solution is just to allow any generator producing values of a specified type (e.g. unsigned int or unsigned char) to be used with create(), and leave the initialization of the generator to the user. Matthias