[R] sorted reshaping?

[ivo welch]

dear R wizards:  I am wrestling with reshape.  I have a long data set
that I want to convert into a wide data set, in which rows are firms
and columns are years.

> summary(rin)
     firm              fyear             sim1
 Min.   :1004.00   Min.   :1964.0   Min.   : -1.00000
 1st Qu.:1010.00   1st Qu.:1979.0   1st Qu.: -0.14334
 Median :1016.00   Median :1986.0   Median :  0.00116
 Mean   :1016.34   Mean   :1986.1   Mean   :  1.03475
 3rd Qu.:1021.00   3rd Qu.:1993.2   3rd Qu.:  0.26931
 Max.   :1034.00   Max.   :2007.0   Max.   :110.66860
 S.D.   :   9.26   S.D.   :  10.0   S.D.   :  8.37811
 T-stat :1551.59   T-stat :2804.7   T-stat :  1.69344
 Obs.   : 200.00   Obs.   : 200.0   Obs.   :188.00000
                                    NA's   : 12.00000

the firms and years are both ordered.   I tried reshape(rin,
timevar="fyear", idvar="gvkey", direction="wide"), and the shape seems
to be what I want, but the columns come out in random order
(sim1.1980, then sim1.2001, then sim1.1977) and so on.  I would like
years to go from left to right, too.  Is there an easy way to
accomplish this?

sincerely,

/iaw
----
Ivo Welch (ivo.welch at brown.edu, ivo.welch at gmail.com)