note kikuchiyo Thanks for the answers.<br> <br> I know that one shouldn't use the built-in PRNG for any 'serious' work - this is true for most programming languages, not only Perl.<br> <br> There are several modules implementing 'better' PRNGs on CPAN, furthermore, Perl has interfaces for many well-known and well-tested mathemathical libraries, each having a good library of PRNG functions (GMP, PARI, GSL among others). So if I were to do any kind of serious work that involved random numbers, for example cryptography or stat.phys. simulations, I'd use one of the above.<br> <br> Still, it's sad to know that the built-in generator is _this_ useless on certain platforms.<br> 803632 803632