Re: [Bug-apl] An inventory of entropy

[Kacper Gutowski]

I used something similar installed as an user command, but it's a trivial
one-liner and only good reason to include it in distribution would be to
do it right while avoiding possible mistakes and pitfalls—which the
proposed code doesn't do. (Where does 4294967294 come from?  Twice the
MINSTD modulus?  It seems to be written for different interpreter because
it's a tiny fraction of the 64-bit state used by GNU APL's ⎕RL.)

However, doing it through ⎕FIO sounds like a really good idea, because
it could, for example, instead of reading from /dev/urandom, expose the
getentropy/getrandom syscall on systems that support it (which includes
linux >3.17) with only reading from a device as a fallback on systems
that don't.


-k