[Python-Dev] Counting collisions for the win

[Steven D'Aprano]

Paul McMillan wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 21, 2012 at 4:19 PM, Jared Grubb <jared.grubb at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I agree; it sounds really odd to throw an exception since nothing is actually wrong and there's nothing the caller would do about it to recover anyway. Rather than throwing an exception, maybe you just reseed the random value for the hash
> 
> This is nonsense. You have to determine the random seed at startup,
> and it has to be uniform for the entire life of the process. You can't
> change it after Python has started.

I may have a terminology problem here. I expect that a random seed must change 
every time it is used, otherwise the pseudorandom number generator using it 
just returns the same value each time. Should we be talking about a salt 
rather than a seed?



-- 
Steven