Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> Perceptive readers will note that 100 does not actually show up on a d100 or rand(100).

I was just perceptive enough to notice, that, copy the entire table into a comment and pontificate on it, then notice that I missed the sentence in question immediately after commenting, and delete it 3 seconds after posting it. :/



But is the "perceptive reader" actually correct?

There are many pictures online of d100 dice clearly showing a '100': http://www.amazon.com/Role-Playing-Dice-Spherical-ZOCCHIHEDR...

And while the argument for rand() starting at 0 is true for Perl, even this is language dependent. More frequently, rand() doesn't even take an argument: http://linux.die.net/man/3/rand


Yes, my comment (prior to deletion) said and rand(n), depending on implementation, may explicitly exclude n. I looked it up for C/C++ first, but it was slightly confusing, and there are articles that go into quite a bit of depth about how rand() can be misleading. perldoc was my next stop, as I was almost positive that perl's rand explicitly excluded the upper bound (and it does).

My recollection of 100-sided dice was that it was often printed as "00", so you could take it as either 0 or 100, depending on your need.


I have a d100 that says otherwise. I've encountered a rand() that said otherwise also, but he was just being silly.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: