In perl versions up to 5.003 (I think), srand needed to be
called explicitly, but as of 5.004 (again, I think), srand
was called implicitly with the first call to rand. Wnen
srand is called implicitly however, the seed it is given is
a number based on the time, which is predictable, so it's
recommended to call it again with a better seed if it's for
something more important, like cryptography purposes. | [reply] |
The results from perldoc -f srand on the latest stable
release of perl yield the following results.
"In versions of Perl prior to
5.004 the default seed was just the current
time(). This isn't a particularly good seed, so
many old programs supply their own seed value
(often time ^ $$ or time ^ ($$ + ($$ << 15))), but
that isn't necessary any more."
| [reply] |