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by michaelt 4316 days ago
Any language that allows the PRNG to be manually seeded, presumably?

I mean, if manually seeding the PRNG doesn't produce a deterministic result, you wouldn't make it part of the API.

2 comments

Nope.

Essentially all languages allow manual seeding: almost none specify guarantees with regard to RNG behavior. I'm pretty sure this is because determinism of a given process important (everyone who does simulation needs that), but locking into potentially bad RNGs for the language or library itself, in fact specifying them, is a really bad idea.

Counterexample: Python [1]

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/19179886/1814881