[metapost] re: non-deviant "deviates"

[Taco Hoekwater]

Hi Larry,

Larry Siebenmann wrote:

>  > Maybe somehow gettimeofday()
>  > isn't available in OzTeX, or configure guessed wrongly.
> 
> The Macintosh has various sorts of time access with units as fine
> as microseconds.

Perhaps you should start using gwTeX. There rule for all
systems that are based on Web2c (TeXlive, tetex, fptex, gwtex)
is as follows:

a. if the C library has gettimeofday(), use that (microsecs)
b. if not, but there is ftime(), us that (millisecs)
c. if neither are there, use time(), (seconds)

If you are certain your operating system has one of the first
two functions, but your distribution/port of TeX  does not use
them, then you should either complain to the distributor, or
switch distros.

Setting seeds is system-dependant (because all portable solutions
depend on the current time), so there is no way to fix this
from the 'core source'.

Greetings, Taco