random number generator?

ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk writes:

That's what RNGkind and set.seed do, and have done for a long time.
The information is also stored in .Random.seed, but few users would record 
that (and it does not exist until the first RNG is used).

.. but if you don't set the seed, you shouldn't expect reproducible
behaviour anyway:

[pd at rasch pd]$ echo "rnorm(2)" | R --vanilla --slave
[1] 2.0281025 0.8735026

[pd at rasch pd]$ echo "rnorm(2)" | R --vanilla --slave
[1] -1.2695122 -0.0448524

I mean, if the prototypical answer to people complaining "I'm not
getting the same results" is simply to ask them to put an 
RNGkind("Marsaglia-Multicarry","Kinderman-Ramage") next to their first
set.seed(), how troublesome could it be?

O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907