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Hello Bernard,
would Giac compilation fail if the header random.h was included? It belongs to C++11 standard, so I'm not sure. I would like to use it in some new code that I'm preparing. Thanks!

It would probably fail with some compilers I'm using. At some point, I know that I'll need to switch to C++11 but I'm not impatient because I fear it will raise some headdaches. What random functions do you need?

I need simple stuff, just generating a random integer in the given range [m,n) and the standard Gaussian random variable (mean=0 and stddev=1). The latter could be obtained by Box-Muller algorithm, while the former is as easy as m+rand()%(n-m), but it is in fact not uniform (lower numbers are slightly more likely to be returned). I know that Giac implements a better algorithm somewhere, can you point me to it please? I'm using STL containers of integers for speed, so i would like to avoid using gen class when generating random numbers (otherwise they would be easy to obtain by _rand), if possible.

giac_rand(contextptr) returns a random integer between 0 and rand_max2 (included) and randNorm(contextptr) returns a random double according to the normal law.

Thanks! I'll then use giac_rand(ctx)/(rand_max2+1.0) for generating a real in [0,1[ and giac_rand(ctx)%n for an integer in [0,n-1].