Warp wrote:
>   Let me as you the reverse question: Why should we *not* offer large
> seeds? Why limit the usability of the RNGs for no good reason?

It disturbs the syntax of the seed() call that exists even more. So it's 
mostly a matter that you already addressed: the syntax is ugly.

However, consider your longseed() example. Why not pass the random number 
stream to the longseed() routine.  seed() would still be used to seed and 
create a random number generator, but now you can reseed the generator with 
longseed().  Given that someone might want to do this with the current PRNG, 
it could just be called "reseed()".

Conflating "create a PRNG stream" with "set the seed" seems to be at the 
crux of the syntactic-ugliness problem.  Just a thought to stew upon.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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