From thomas@biostat.washington.edu  Thu Mar 19 17:53:41 1998
From: thomas@biostat.washington.edu (Thomas Lumley)
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 1998 09:53:41 -0800 (PST)
Subject: a handy function "format.cardinal", looking for a proper name..
In-Reply-To: <199803191121.MAA07944@sophie.ethz.ch>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.95.980319092833.11081A-100000@chekov>

On Thu, 19 Mar 1998, Martin Maechler wrote:> 
>     >> This is not a nice name (format is generic; cardinal is not a class)
>     >> for a nice function, which I would like in several places in R code
>     >> and therefore would like to become part of R (under a better name !)
>     >> 

I would have though "ordinal" would be a better name.  Those things are
called ordinals, not cardinals.  This would also allow a language argument
to produce

ordinal(1:3,"english") 
"1st" "2nd" "3rd"
ordinal(1:3,"francais")
"1re" "2me" "3me"

and so on (we probably have people on R-devel who can supply rules
for most common languages using the Latin alphabet). 

On the other hand, aren't there GNU internationali{s,z}ation libraries
that handle this sort of thing?


Thomas Lumley
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a handy function "format.cardinal", looking for a proper name..
Thomas Lumley