This functionality does seem needed in base R to me too but
in the interim you could create a package to make it available on
CRAN or if that seems excessive for just one function you could
contact the author of one of the multi-author packages and see if
they would include it in their package.
I've noticed that a frequently asked question on R-help is how to sort a
data frame by multiple columns. Since this question is asked so often,
making this task easier for users seems a worthwhile goal.
At a minimum, the following changes to the documentation would surely be
helpful and reduce e
