Different concern. What if someone were to have code implementing an external, persistent hash table, using Python&#39;s hash() function? They might have a way to rehash everything when a new version of Python comes along, but they would not be happy if hash() is different in each process. I somehow vaguely remember possibly having seen such code, or something else where a bit of random data was needed and hash() was used since it&#39;s so easily available.<br clear="all">

<br>-- <br>--Guido van Rossum (<a href="http://python.org/~guido">python.org/~guido</a>)<br>