seed will work as advertised. Regardless of the outcome of this discussion, I will make sure that the exact behavior is documented.
I think that's the key here: if the documentation clearly states that the seed is treated modulo N or whatever then that would be OK for me. Whatever the status quo is unacceptable given that seeding with unspecified values (from time() or some other non-deterministic device) is so commonplace. Throwing an exception for out-of-range values might work, but as pointed out the exception would occur so infrequently in practice that your just creating another source of bugs. Robert, what if the docs clearly stated that "Safe values for the seed are 0-N, values outside this range get wrapped within it via modulo N arithmetic, therefore different seeds can result in the same sequence of random values if one of those seeds is outside of the safe range." Or something like that ;-) John.