Lots of ways to do it, depending on needed quality. The one I use for cross-platform stability in testing is the Middle-square method. It's actually a pretty bad RNG if you need any real rigor or a very large number of points, but it's fast, intuitive and insensitive to round-off.

my $seed = 21324556;
sub _prng {
    # von Neumann middle-square method
    return 1e-8*($seed = int(1e-4 * $seed**2) % 1e8);
}
[download]

This seed converges to zero after 16348 iterations, with an average in that population of 0.5002 and a standard deviation of 0.2878. If you go for more than 8 digits of precision, you will start seeing machine dependence.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.