gaussfacts 0.0.4 on CRAN: New Feature
Another new release of the gaussfacts package arrived on CRAN. This follows a recent one a good week ago, which had been the first in pretty much exactly a decade!
gaussfacts
provides a fortunes-inspired
function to display randomly-chosen facts about Carl Friedrich
Gauss, based on the collection curated by Mike Cavers via the gaussfacts web site (with an archive.org link
it case it vanishes again). Each call of gaussfact()
displays another (randomly chosen, or indexed) fact.
This release corrects an old typo, thanks to an issue filed right
after the last release. It also adds a small (but useful) feature that
(most if not all of) the other fortunes-alike packages
already have: the ability to look up by (matching) character string.
So to take an example, asking for “dice”’ gets us these two cracker quotes that still make me smile:
> gaussfacts::gaussfact("dice") # match string
God does not play dice, unless Gauss promises to let him win once in a while.
God does not play dice with the universe, but Gauss does.
> Thanks for an issue filed, we also corrected an old typo. The NEWS file entry follows.
Changes in version 0.0.4 (2026-09-01)
Support character argument to support lookup via regular expression
Correct one old typo in README.md
Otherwise, and always worth noting, this update had a particularly speedy passage at CRAN taking a whole six minutes:
Thanks to my CRANberries, there is a diff to the previous release. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.
