FORMAT and cardinal nos.

[Dave Bakhash]

Hi,

I thought I once remmebered reading about FORMAT being able to do
cardinality (or whatever that's caled), i.e.

(format nil "~<some-character>" 3)

==> "third"

Does format do that? If so, what's the directive? I looked through the
CLHS, but didn't see it there. What _was_ there was the ~R directive,
which would print "three" in the above case, but I want "third", etc.

thanks,
dave

[Barry Margolin]

In article <c29vgfo...@nerd-xing.mit.edu>,

Dave Bakhash <ca...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>I thought I once remmebered reading about FORMAT being able to do
>cardinality (or whatever that's caled), i.e.
>
>(format nil "~<some-character>" 3)
>
>==> "third"

That's ordinal.

>Does format do that? If so, what's the directive? I looked through the
>CLHS, but didn't see it there. What _was_ there was the ~R directive,
>which would print "three" in the above case, but I want "third", etc.

If you read the full description of ~R, you'd see that the : modifier
does what you want.

--
Barry Margolin, bar...@genuity.net
Genuity, Woburn, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.

[Raymond Wiker]

Dave Bakhash <ca...@alum.mit.edu> writes:

Try "~:R" instead of "~R":

* (format t "~a ~R ~:R~%" 3 3 3)
3 three third

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[Erik Naggum]

* Dave Bakhash <ca...@alum.mit.edu>

| Does format do that? If so, what's the directive? I looked through the
| CLHS, but didn't see it there. What _was_ there was the ~R directive,
| which would print "three" in the above case, but I want "third", etc.

Check out the : and @ modifiers to format control characters.

///
--
The past is not more important than the future, despite what your culture
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[Eric Moss]

Raymond Wiker wrote:

>
> Dave Bakhash <ca...@alum.mit.edu> writes:
> Try "~:R" instead of "~R":
>
> * (format t "~a ~R ~:R~%" 3 3 3)
> 3 three third

Note, however, if you have an older copy of lispworks, you might have
trouble with certain negative multiples of 10 (they fixed it a few
months ago):

(format nil "~:R" -90)
=> "ninetieth"

(format nil "~:R" -80)
=> "eightieth"

(format nil "~:R" -89)
=> "minus eighty-ninth"

Eric