RNG initialization

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On Mon, 17 Jan 2000, Ben Bolker wrote:

>   It would be nice to be able to initialize the random-number generator
> with a single long argument; I can see that in principle this could be
> done by writing an access method, do_RNGinit (or whatever) for RNG_Init.
> I had trouble with the technical details, possibly because of long/int
> incompatibilities.

What precisely do you want to do? Is that `long' as in C code?  There is no
means to pass a `long' from R code to C, but RNG_Init in fact only
makes use of 32 bits so should have `int' there.  (It's a poor
choice of algorithm though, as it uses a multiplicative generator
without ensuring the starting point is odd.)

My best guess is that you would like a function like S's set.seed,
which when called with a single number sets the whole initial seed.
This is certainly easy to do, and can be done easily in R code.
Since set.seed seems a suitable name and it would help compatibility,
would

set.seed(seed, kind = 0)

be a suitable interface?  Or would people prefer

RNGinit(kind, seed)

?


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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