is there some functionality in Maxima for creating "true" random numbers?

On Thu, Sep 08, 2011 at 09:19:24AM -0700, Raymond Toy wrote:
> I'm not aware of anything like that in Maxima.  Not sure if you can do this
> from Maxima itself, but from Lisp you can easily open /dev/urandom and read
> a few words to get "true" randomness.
>

thanks, didn't know that; good enough that I access it as shell script.
Thanks!

Oliver
 
> > I just wonder whether Maxima has some easy access to some
> > "true" random source. I am aware of the Internet resources,
> > but I would also like to have something like that in Maxima.
> > It just needs to be reasonable: I partially mistrust the Internet
> > resources (what if everything is logged?).
> > It would be nice if Maxima had some function for extracting some
> > randomness out of the computer.
> >