R devel - Jun 2004 - .Random.seed saved in .RData

Is it intentional that the .Random.seed is saved in .RData?  If people 
run multiple sessions from the same directory they will get the same 
intial seed setting, which seems a bit dangerous. I don't often save my 
session nor run two sessions in the same directory, so I have never run 
it this, but there was a question on r-help where it may have been an issue.

Paul Gilbert

On Wed, 9 Jun 2004, Paul Gilbert wrote:
> Is it intentional that the .Random.seed is saved in .RData?  If people 
Yes.  (And it happens in S-PLUS equivalently.)  The idea of saving .RData
is to save the session where it left off, and perhaps go forward in
different ways from the same session, e.g. to stop after 37 more
simulations and examine what happened there.
> run multiple sessions from the same directory they will get the same 
> intial seed setting, which seems a bit dangerous. I don't often save my
> session nor run two sessions in the same directory, so I have never run 
> it this, but there was a question on r-help where it may have been an
issue.
I don't think it was the issue there.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
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