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Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 23:56:41 +0000
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] rand(), mt_rand() and limits
From: j.boggiano@seld.be (Jordi Boggiano)

Overall it's a good plan IMO and it would clean things up for sure. On 
the other hand if we don't remove old docs it will just make the docs 
pages even more complex since the docs for rand() will highly depend on 
which PHP version is used.

On 11/01/2015 22:12, Andrea Faulds wrote:
>    * Make mt_srand() and srand() do nothing and produce a deprecation notice

That is the only point with which I disagree. Looking at 
http://3v4l.org/FLHBV we see that while indeed across PHP versions the 
result has not always been the same, it generally is, and especially 
within one given version setting a seed means you get predictable results.

This has benefits in some cases like fixtures generation where it might 
not be important if the output changes when you upgrade PHP, but you 
don't want entirely different fixtures every single time. Obviously if 
we could guarantee the algo won't change it would be even better.

Bottom line is I think it's important to have the ability to set the 
seed yourself.

Cheers

-- 
Jordi Boggiano
@seldaek - http://nelm.io/jordi