Thanks for the answers.

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.

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.

Still, it's sad to know that the built-in generator is _this_ useless on certain platforms.

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