[comp.os.vms] PHONE - VAX CONNECTION AND MTH$RANDOM

graham@DRCVAX.ARPA (07/28/87)

Greetings and Nostalgifications;

First, thanks to those who told me about set host/dte.  That does what we 
want.  Of course, I could have found that in the documentation, but I'd 
never have thought to look at the 'set host' stuff.

Second, and big question:  The RTL manual tells me that MTH$RANDOM 
generates a pseudorandom number between 0 and 1.  It accept s longword 
seed, and produces a f_float number.  

Well, In a small FORTRAN program (destined for bigger and better things if
I can get this to work) I read the system time into a quadword and take the
lower longword of that as my seed.  Than I call MTH$RANDOM.  Then, for the 
heck of it, I print out the REAL*4 variable answer.

The answers are enormous.  All of them on the order of 10^10.  I can't seem 
to get this routine to give me the answers the book says it should.  There 
is a PL/1 example in the RTL manual, but I don't speak PL/1, so it doesn't 
mean too much.

Any ideas folks??

[If I've missed something stupidly simple, respond to me directly and don't 
trash the net.  If it's a real problem, the net is probably interested 
too.]

Dan Graham
GRAHAM@DRCVAX.ARPA
------