From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: cowan@ccil.org (John Cowan)
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2010 21:23:00 -0400
Subject: [TUHS] Origins of drand48()?
In-Reply-To: <20100331222002.GA28694@minnie.tuhs.org>
References: <20100331222002.GA28694@minnie.tuhs.org>
Message-ID: <20100401012300.GJ17405@mercury.ccil.org>

Warren Toomey scripsit:

> As far as I can determine, drand48() arrived in SysVR1 and is defined
> in the first SVID. It doesn't appear in SysIII, nor in the early BSDs.
> Can anybody shed some light on drand48()? Could it have been written
> elsewhere and made available e.g on a Usenix tape or comp.sources.*,
> and included into SysV, or is SysV the origin of the code?

FWIW, the code appears in OpenSolaris with an AT&T 1988 copyright header.
It's been generified and given a CDDL license and Sun Microsystems 2008
copyright header.

There are a bunch of other copies floating around *without* an AT&T
copyright, e.g.
http://cs.nyu.edu/~yap/classes/visual/data/ply/cygwin-version/ply/drand48.c .

> I'm sure the algorithm comes from elsewhere, e.g. Knuth, but the
> strong code similarity is a worry.

It's a linear congruential generator with multiplier 25214903917,
addend 11, and modulus 2^48, so there's nothing special about that.
LCGs are indeed discussed in Knuth volume 2.

-- 
John Cowan  cowan at ccil.org    http://ccil.org/~cowan
Big as a house, much bigger than a house, it looked to [Sam], a grey-clad
moving hill.  Fear and wonder, maybe, enlarged him in the hobbit's eyes,
but the Mumak of Harad was indeed a beast of vast bulk, and the like of him
does not walk now in Middle-earth; his kin that live still in latter days are
but memories of his girth and his majesty.  --"Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit"
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