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Mastering the C++17 STL

You're reading from   Mastering the C++17 STL Make full use of the standard library components in C++17

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Product type Paperback
Published in Sep 2017
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781787126824
Length 384 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Arthur O'Dwyer Arthur O'Dwyer
Author Profile Icon Arthur O'Dwyer
Arthur O'Dwyer
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Table of Contents (13) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Classical Polymorphism and Generic Programming 2. Iterators and Ranges FREE CHAPTER 3. The Iterator-Pair Algorithms 4. The Container Zoo 5. Vocabulary Types 6. Smart Pointers 7. Concurrency 8. Allocators 9. Iostreams 10. Regular Expressions 11. Random Numbers 12. Filesystem

Random numbers versus pseudo-random numbers

When talking about random numbers in the context of computer programming, we must be careful to distinguish between truly random numbers, which come from a physically non-deterministic source, and pseudo-random numbers, which come from an algorithm that deterministically produces a stream of "random-looking" numbers. Such an algorithm is called a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG). Every PRNG conceptually works the same way--it has some internal state, and it has some way for the user to ask for the next output. Every time we ask for the next output, the PRNG scrambles its internal state according to some deterministic algorithm and returns some piece of that state. Here's an example:

    template<class T>
class SimplePRNG {
uint32_t state = 1;
public:
static constexpr T min() { return 0; }
...
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