Re: [MIT-Scheme-devel] feature request

[Taylor R Campbell]

   Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:36:18 +0000
   From: "naruto canada" <address@hidden>

   On 9/16/08, Taylor R Campbell <address@hidden> wrote:
   > What does %N mean?  It's not a standard strftime(3) format.

   date --version
   date (GNU coreutils) 6.12

OK, instead of telling me what software you happen to be using, can
you tell me what information it is that you want?

   > Why don't you just generate, say, 128 random bits?

   how do you do that in mit-scheme without possibly multiple processes
   getting the same time as entropy?

RANDOM-SOURCE-RANDOMIZE! and MAKE-RANDOM-STATE both seed from
/dev/urandom if it is available.  Judging by your date(1)
implementation, I'm guessing you're on a GNU/Linux system, which
suggests that /dev/urandom will be available, and even if you drain it
of entropy, it probably won't yield the same seed data anyway to multiple
different processes.