The Old New Thing

What is the history of the GetRandomRgn function?

June 18, 2012 Jun 18, 2012 06/18/12

Raymond Chen

An anonymous commenter was curious about how the function arrived at its strange name, what the purpose of the third parameter is, and why it is inconsistent between Windows 95 and Windows NT. The sense of word "random" here is hacker slang rather than its formal probabilistic definition, specifically sense 2: "Assorted, ...