sql questions

Hi,

a) I am running some select query
select ... order by ....
Now, I would like to preserver the ordering through further processing by adding a sequence number
Of course I can do:
create temp sequence mseq;
select xx.*, nextval('mseq') as ord from (select ... order by ....) xx;
drop sequence mseq;
Is there a simpler way (avoiding the create/drop parts)

b) can a sql function return the count of affected rows of some query?
create function merge_names(int, int) returns void as
$_$
update namelinks set nid = $2 where nid = $1;
-- want the affected rows of the above query
delete from names where nid = $1
-- return result here
$_$
language sql;

Best regards
Wolfgang Hamann