Re: Lua For PalmOS Alpha2 released

["Adam D. Moss" <adam@...>]

Philippe Lhoste wrote:
> > Bad Things:
> >     - PalmOS MathLib does not have a rand() or srand() function. If 
> > you have
> > one, MIT licesend, please send to us, so we can add it to the port.
>
> I believe the Meresnne Twister 
> <http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~m-mat/MT/emt.html> was 
> implemented in Lua or in C with Lua interface. Maybe this is an overkill 
> for the PalmOS (I don't know if the implementation is really big or slow 
> or memory hungry. They say it is as fast as rand(), and consumes 624 
> words of workplace, probably because it generates 624 numbers at each 
> iteration)

I may as well pimp my random number generator again, since
it's probably good for low-power CPUs, though it doesn't come
with a lua binding (yet!) but that should be simple:
http://icculus.org/~aspirin/fnvrand/

It uses only a few bytes of state and is about 10x faster than
a good MT implementation, though I really doubt the quality of
randomness is comparable (but it's pretty good, from casual
analysis).

--Adam