> Different concern. What if someone were to have code implementing an > external, persistent hash table, using Python'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's so > easily available.
I agree that there are use cases for allowing users to choose the random seed, in much the same way it's helpful to be able to set it for the random number generator. This should probably be something that can be passed in at runtime. This feature would also be useful for users who want to synchronize the hashes of multiple independent processes, for whatever reason. For the general case though, randomization should be on by default. -Paul _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
