As an alternative suggestion, how about treating PRNGs
syntactically more like an object, such as

#declare R = prng {type 1 seed 42}

It gives more flexibility to the syntax as the specified
attributes may now depend on the type of PRNG (possibly some
PRNGs could have additional settings such as number of bits
used or similar?).

Obviously, "seed(n)" should be treated as "prng{type 0 seed n}",
although it might print a warning about obsolete syntax.

The seed attribute would be convenient 32-bit seed, but some PRNGs may
support specifying specialized seed values via additional attributes 
long_seed or a different syntax for seed such as "seed {1,2,3,4}".
This syntax could probably be shared for most complex PRNGs.

There may also be additional type-specific attributes for
initializing the complete "state" of a PRNG (from messages in
this thread I infer the state may encompass more information
than even a long seed value?). However, to actually allow
persisting the state, it would be necessary to have a
function such as rand_state(R).

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