As a matter of fact, I do; as do many people who take cryptography seriously: > Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of co

As a matter of fact, I do; as do many people who take cryptography seriously: > Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin. For, as has been pointed out several times, there is no such thing as a random number — there are only methods to produce random numbers, and a strict arithmetic procedure of course is not such a method. - John Von Neumann But to your broader point, no, this is not a question of semantics. There is an actual syntactical difference being asserted here. That difference is this: randomness has nothing to do with numbers. 0xca--the same number--can be either "random" or "non-random" depending on how you got ahold of it. When we talk about numbers--prime numbers, even numbers, rational numbers, etc., we are talking about properties of the number; whether they are divisible by 2 and so on. But "random numbers" have no property by which we could recognize them. It is entirely a question of where the numbers were made, not what they are or what they look like.