in reply to Random Numbers

what does that "%10" at the end of little_mistress' code do?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
RE: Re: Random Numbers
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Apr 10, 2000 at 03:03 UTC
    % is the modulo operator. If you're familiar with long division, it gives the remainder. It'll chop off the fractional portion, due to some internal conversion magic.

    (int is probably faster, but TIMTOWTDI). That, and I don't think rand will ever return exactly 10, in this case.

      um you know actually i think your right ... it should be rand(10)%10 and i should have used srand to seed the rand function. But when it comes down to it in most cases what i find is that random enough numbers are enough. And its pretty impossible to get a "truely" random number from a computer. So I dont press the point. I could see however in cases where say you were doing some sort of research to select subjects at random to fill a number of cells. In that case you would want a better random algorhythm, but in most cases ... its really ok to just have a random enough number.

        | And its pretty impossible to get a "truely" random
        | number from a computer

        Actually, it is quite possible to do so and it is done quite frequently. A popular way is from timing events, such as a user's input into the keyboard. (It's generating the seed that is a real issue.) Using good old unreliable human input works quite nicely :).

        Point taken that it is good enough for this example (as long as srand is used, of course!)