Why couldn't it have been 42?

[Rich Salz <rsalz@osf.org>]

[drand48 is supposed to return a random number]

From: Arve Kjoelen <akjoele@shiva.ee.siue.edu>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 1995 10:38:58 -0500

Kun Luo, one of our grad students here recently found a bug in Sun's
implementation of the drand48() function.  We reported it to Sun, and they
acknowledged the bug exists - it seemed to be the first time they had
heard of it, though.  The bug affects Sun's ANSI C compiler shipped with
SPARCWorks3.0 and consists of the following:  If you're compiling using
the -Xc flag (strict ANSI C, no SUN C compatibility extensions), the
function drand48() is BROKEN.  It ALWAYS returns the number 9.000000 ...