nick, thank you for your response. as always, a thoughful one too. your suggestions are closer to what i wanted. i like the fact that at the end of your solution yes is intuitively coded as 1 whilst no is coded as 0 where martin's suggestion was vice versa (tho easily changed).
more invaluably - i am introduced to cond(x,a,b,c), which i looked up at [R] functions under programming functions!
season's greetings,
bw
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