Generating unique numbers?

[Christopher Browne]

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, xscottgjunk at yahoo.com (Scott Gilbert) wrote:
> VanL <vlindberg at verio.net> wrote in message news:<3CF7EBC8.4080802 at verio.net>...
>> Is there a good algorithm for generating unique numbers 
>> (ints, specifically) that can be used as object identifiers?
>> 
>> I am discounding the obvious newid += 1 because I will need 
>> to merge different sets, and while I may have some number 
>> overlap, using a simple count for each object would 
>> guarantee that I have the maximum number of clashes.
>> 
>> Specifically, I will be using these numbers as dictionary keys.
>> 
>
> If you're on windows, you could use the pythoncom module CreateGuid
> function.
>
> Basically GUIDs are 128 bit numbers that are pretty much going to be
> unique no matter where or when you call the function.

And GUIDs are basically DCE UUIDs.

<http://packages.debian.org/stable/devel/uuid-dev.html>
<http://www.gnuenterprise.org/doc/uuid-dev/>

I think this is all C stuff; it oughtn't be _too_ difficult to wrap it
into a Python library...
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