Is python's “set” stable?

Question

The question arose when answering to another SO question (there).

When I iterate several times over a python set (without changing it between calls), can I assume it

Answer 1

And when I call the same python program repeatedly (not random, not input dependent), will I get the same ordering for sets?

I can answer this part of the question now after a quick experiment. Using the following code:

class Foo(object) :
  def __init__(self,val) :
    self.val = val
  def __repr__(self) :
    return str(self.val)

x = set()
for y in range(500) :
  x.add(Foo(y))
print list(x)[-10:]

I can trigger the behaviour that I was asking about in the other question. If I run this repeatedly then the output changes, but not on every run. It seems to be "weakly random" in that it changes slowly. This is certainly implementation dependent so I should say that I'm running the macports Python2.6 on snow-leopard. While the program will output the same answer for long runs of time, doing something that affects the system entropy pool (writing to the disk mostly works) will somethimes kick it into a different output.

The class Foo is just a simple int wrapper as experiments show that this doesn't happen with sets of ints. I think that the problem is caused by the lack of __eq__ and __hash__ members for the object, although I would dearly love to know the underlying explanation / ways to avoid it. Also useful would be some way to reproduce / repeat a "bad" run. Does anyone know what seed it uses, or how I could set that seed?