Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random numbers is, of course, in a state of sin. -- John von Neumann

The problem with calling it repeatedly is that you're not really making things any more random. rand only produces pseudorandom numbers based on the seed. You're not increasing the amount of entropy you're going to get out of it by multiple calls. In fact, if you're using things such as the process id in the seed you might even be reducing it (since the seeds could be `close' and put the generator in states that could overlap).

Think of it this way: you've got a big book with pages full of numbers. srand tells what page in the book that rand should start reading from. Repeated calls to srand won't put any more randomness into the book, and might start reading numbers from pages you've already read.

If you're really concerned about the randomness of your numbers then you want to forget rand all together and look into Math::TrulyRandom, or Crypt::Random if you have a /dev/random device available on your OS.

In reply to Keep this in mind by Fletch
in thread srand and seed by hopes

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