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Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2014 20:08:39 +0100
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To: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Rouven_We=DFling?= <me@rouvenwessling.de>
Cc: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [PHP6] Merging rand and mt_rand()
From: nikita.ppv@gmail.com (Nikita Popov)

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On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 7:45 PM, Rouven We=DFling <me@rouvenwessling.de>wro=
te:

> Hello internals,
>
> there has already been a lot of talk about improving secure random number
> generation for PHP6. One thing I'd like to improve as well, would be
> non-secure random number generation. Here is not so much security at stak=
e
> but ease of use.
>
> The obvious solution, would be to rename mt_rand to rand and make rand an
> alias. (The same for the supporting functions mt_srand and mt_getrandmax)=
.
>
> What I'm missing is the history. What was the reason to keep the separate=
?
> Am I missing something?
>
> Best regards
> Rouven
>

Changing the random number generation algorithm is a BC break, e.g. tests
could rely on certain random number sequences for a certain seed. However
it sounds reasonable to make rand, array_shuffle, str_shuffle etc make use
of MT 19937 in PHP6, as we have a bit more freedom with breakage.

Nikita

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