Re: Curiosity about math.random in LuaTeX

["Thomas A. Schmitz" <thomas.schmitz@uni-bonn.de>]

On Oct 25, 2009, at 9:26 AM, Taco Hoekwater wrote:

> Otared KAVIAN wrote:
>> Indeed I guess that this is due to the random seed used by LuaTeX:  
>> is it
>> possible to force a new random seed upon each typesetting?
>
> The randomseed is set by context, and saved between consecutive runs  
> of
> the same file. Normally, this is what you would want: just imagine  
> what
> happens if each of the luatex runs in a 'context' call used a  
> different
> value always.
>
> However (this is mostly for Hans), there is a bug in that process: all
> randomseeds in mkiv appear to be between 0 and 1. Since  
> math.randomseed() expects an integer, this gives almost no
> randomness at all to the seed values.
>
> If you want near-random randomness, you can set the seed yourself
> based on the return value of os.time():
>
>  \ctxlua{math.randomseed(os.time())}

Ah, that explains why I could never get random numbers in mkiv when I  
tried a year ago. Another suggestion: there's also a \getrandomnumber  
command available in ConTeXt, which seems to work well.

Thomas
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