Underspecification of ~R

[shebs%utah-orion@utah-cs.arpa (Stanley T. Shebs)]

In the description of the various : and @ options to ~R (cardinals, ordinals,
and two flavors of Roman numerals), it is said that any integer is printed
in the appropriate way.  How should negative and very large integers be
handled?  HP CL prints out a "negative " for negative cardinals and ordinals,
and prints out various error messages for other cases.  I would prefer to
see "minus four" and have an error for negative cardinals, since "minus
fourth" sounds pretty strange!  Sandra suggests "a lot" as the right way
to print large integers, while I favor "many" (consider the New Guinea
tribes whose number system is "one", "two", "three", "many").  There should
also be a definite bound on integer size (I would make it low;  "five
decillion" also looks pretty strange).  Finally, keep in mind that Americans
and Britons do things differently above one million - perhaps the time
zone returned by get-decoded-time should be used to decide whether to
print "billion" or "milliard" (which do Canadians use anyway?).

Of course, the : and @ options could just be omitted...

						stan the obscure