l ttyaMeos arrCsrihm!!l

With my perls, the original one-liner works as intended for 5.8.8 up to and including 5.18.0.
But with 5.20.0 I get the same as you.

The srand documentation contains this:

However, there are a few situations where programs are likely to
want to call "srand". One is for generating predictable results,
generally for testing or debugging. There, you use
"srand($seed)", with the same $seed each time.
[download]

That suggests to me that srand(42) should produce identical results whenever it is called.
I can't find anything in the docs that indicate there have been changes to srand - grepping 5.20.0 perldelta for srand produced no hits.

However, there *is* mention (in perldelta) of changes to rand with 5.20, and I guess that if the rand implementation has changed then the same seed will no longer yield same results.
I do think that the breakage of srand($seed) between 5.20 and earlier perls should have been spelled out in the srand documentation ... probably worth a bug report from someone who cares.

Cheers,
Rob

---

---

• 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.