RNG initialization

[Paul Gilbert]

>I was just proposing
>to be compatible with S-PLUS and not syskern.  I really don't
>see why syskern needs to use the name set.seed.

No, syskern does not need to use the name set.seed. I used it hoping this stuff
would move to R  base at some point and I could remove it from syskern.

Beyond the name however, there are some Splus compatiblity issues which probably
should be discussed. I seem to recall that there was some difficulty producing
Splus runif results in R.  Also, the ability to specify the RNG in R is nice and
should be accommodated, and setting the seed without setting the RNG is probably
not wise. Finally, I feel it is important to also specify the algorithms for
other transformations such rnorm. This way, one can be relatively confident that
a random experiment can be reproduced.

Paul Gilbert

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