Apropos sprintf behavior

If changes to sprintf behavior are being considered, would it
be possible to allow some of the other K&R conversion
specifiers?

xX - for integer to hex conversion, and
c  - for ascii value to character conversion

would all be useful for me.

Thanks, Steve Dutky

On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 11:02:20 +0000 (GMT), Prof Brian Ripley
wrote:

+On Mon, 14 Feb 2005, Wolfgang Huber wrote:
+
+> Dear Prof. Ripley,
+>
+> Would it be possible to make sprintf accept vector
arguments?
+> I.e. allow expressions like
+>  sprintf("%04d", 1:3)
+> to produce something like what currently needs to be done
via
+>  sapply(1:3, function(i) sprintf("%04d",i))
+
+I have thought about this, but it is not really clear what
the right thing
+would be here with multiple arguments.  What should
+
+sprintf(("%04d %s", 1:3, "abc")
+
+do?  Produce a character vector of length 1 or 3?  If of
length 1,
+"0001 0002 0003 abc" or "0001 2 0003 abc"?
+
+I guess the most R-like thing would be to recycle args to
the length of
+the longest and then use them in parallel, but that can be
done fairly
+easily by *apply.