Why couldn't it have been 42?

[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 ...