Re: [Dave.Touretzky@B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU: pluralization: two proposals]

[David A. Moon <Moon@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>]

    Date: Mon, 06 Mar 89 21:27:21 EST
    From: Dave.Touretzky@B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU

    My proposal, which would work for many languages besides English, is to
    replace ~P with a new conditional form which would select the singular
    case only when the argument was EQL to 1.

       ~:@[singular~;plural~]

Yes, this is a reasonable proposal.  It wasn't clear to me in the midst of
all the verbiage before that this was what you were proposing.  When I say
it's reasonable, that doesn't mean I'm enthusiastic about it, simply because
I am not enthusiastic about doing anything to FORMAT.

    Of course, it would be better to use ~P to name this new operator; that way
    we could use ~:P to combine it with the ~:* operation.

There are plenty of other letters available (although Dick Waters is using
some of them in his portable pretty-printer).  On the other hand, since you
need to enclose something it's nice to use brackets.  I know, we could
say that : and @ aren't enough modifiers and introduce a third one.  Some
possibilities (I forgot to check whether Waters has already staked a claim
to any of these) are !, +, ., /, =, _, and `.  I skipped " and \ because
of their significance in string syntax.  + looks the best to me, except it
is already in use as a redundant character in prefix parameters.  = is
second-best.