1. Unpredictable (closest to mathematical definition); weird.
The system's been behaving pretty randomly.
2. Assorted; undistinguished. Who was at the
conference?
Just a bunch of random business
types.
3. (pejorative) Frivolous; unproductive; undirected. He's
just a random loser.
4. Incoherent or inelegant; poorly chosen; not well organized.
The program has a random set of misfeatures.
That's a
random name for that function.
Well, all the names were
chosen pretty randomly.
5. In no particular order, though deterministic. The I/O
channels are in a pool, and when a file is opened one is chosen
randomly.
6. Arbitrary. It generates a random name for the scratch
file.
7. Gratuitously wrong, i.e., poorly done and for no good apparent reason. For example, a program that handles file name defaulting in a particularly useless way, or an assembler routine that could easily have been coded using only three registers, but redundantly uses seven for values with non-overlapping lifetimes, so that no one else can invoke it without first saving four extra registers. What randomness!
8. n. A random hacker; used particularly of high-school students who soak up computer time and generally get in the way.
9. n. Anyone who is not a hacker
(or, sometimes, anyone not known to the hacker speaking); the noun form of
sense 2. I went to the talk, but the audience was full of randoms
asking bogus questions
.
10. n. (occasional MIT usage) One who lives at Random Hall. See also J. Random, some random X.
11. [UK] Conversationally, a non sequitur or something similarly
out-of-the-blue. As in: Stop being so random!
This sense
equates to ‘hatstand’, taken from the Viz comic character
Roger Irrelevant - He's completely Hatstand.