>>Is anyone aware of reliability checks of FoxPro's RAND() function to determine whether it adequately
>>simulates random numbers on the interval (0,1)? Thanks.
>
>Superficially, it looks pretty decent. I ran the code below and got the following results for 1M iterations:

>0.0 < 0.1    99,986
>0.1 < 0.2   100,275
>0.2 < 0.3   100,187
>0.3 < 0.4    99,832
>0.4 < 0.5   100,005
>0.5 < 0.6   100,122
>0.6 < 0.7   100,162
>0.7 < 0.8    99,847
>0.8 < 0.9    99,815
>0.9 <= 1.0   99,769

Danged PRE - here's a more readable post:

Yes, RAND() is good. I did some tests using SAS a couple years ago, and vfp RAND() came up a statistically very random Uniform distribution. I use it in statistical work without concern here.

Meanwhile, ironically SAS failed miserably with its equivalent Uniform random generator (and it's a statistical app). Pascal also had a bogus one, it would give the same second number each time after a restart, something like that :)

We have a professional procedeure developed by a bunch of statisticians here using prime numbers to generate random uniforms from mainframe days, but the vfp RAND() is probably just as good as that.