> From: bear <xxxxxx@sonic.net>

> One thing I don't think belongs in this library is the ~p plural.

> That's very specific to English.  And even in English, its sense
> is reversed when you're pluralizing verbs instead of nouns (there,
> the *singular* most frequently has the 's' added and the *plural*
> is most frequently without it).

> This stuff should be locale-dependent, or possibly dynamic, or possibly
> part of a different library altogether.

This is all correct.  The "~P" option dates back to (at least) MacLisp.
Changing it, e.g. to pretty-print which would be a better mnemonic, would
potentially break a bunch of code written over the last 20 years.

> To really address it adequately you'd need a semantics that allowed
> function calls determined by the contents of the format string, ...

In this light-weight FORMAT, "~?" is at least a palliative.  One can do some
interesting things "on the fly".

(format #t  "The wol~?"
	 (language-specific-noun-hack-returning-format-string) wolf-count)
(format #t  " chase~?"
	 (language-specific-verb-hack-returning-format-string) wolf-count)
(format #t  "the boy~? across the snow."
	 (language-specific-noun-hack-returning-format-string) boy-count)

> But I don't think you really want to bite off language-specific
> stuff with this library.

I agree with you.

Cheers,
-KenD