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From: net@opal.cs.tu-berlin.de (Oliver Laumann)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Printing plural forms.
Message-ID: <2706@kraftbus.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Date: 19 Feb 91 13:04:52 GMT
References: <1991Feb19.104810.549@ZYX.SE>
Organization: Technical University of Berlin, Germany
Lines: 25

In article <1991Feb19.104810.549@ZYX.SE> arndt@zyx.ZYX.SE (Arndt Jonasson) writes:
> We all have seen and, in various degrees, been irritated by texts such as:
> 
> 	1 files were copied
> 
> when it should have been:
> 
> 	1 file was copied
> 
> I'd like to know: when programming, how do you avoid such errors? Are
> there features in the programming language you use (or other languages
> you know) that make plural handling especially easy or difficult?

The Common Lisp function "format" has a mechanism to automatically
pluralize a word by appending an `s' when appropriate.  This is no
wonder considering that "format" even has formatting requests to
print a number with roman numerals or as english words (e.g.
"twentyfour files copied")...

In C, a common idiom (well, at least in my programs) is

   printf("%d file%s copied.\n", nfiles, "s"+(nfiles==1));

--
Oliver Laumann    net@tub.cs.tu-berlin.de  net@tub.UUCP  net@pogo.ai.mit.edu