[Rd] fifo on Windows

[Gabor Grothendieck]

fifo already works on UNIX, I assume, so it seems its already
the situation that fifos are supported on some machines running 
R but not on others.  If they were supported on those Windows 
platforms that can handle them then that would simply increase
the proportion of machines running R that can handle them 
(thinking in terms of across all machines running R rather than
thinking in terms of across all machines running R and Windows).
Note that one does have the capabilities command in any case
so the code could query that at the beginning and give an
error if its FALSE so no change to the code would be required 
in the future since it would never run in that situation anyways.

On 8/1/05, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
> Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> > Are there any plans to support fifo on Windows?  On my XP
> > system ("R version 2.1.1, 2005-06-23")
> >
> >    R> capabilities("fifo")
> >
> > gives FALSE.
> >
> > Note that Windows does support named pipes as shown
> > in the utility:
> >
> >    http://gearbox.maem.umr.edu/fwu/pipeslot.zip
> 
> I think named pipes are only supported on the NT descendants.  We will
> need to drop support for Win9x soon, but I think we still have a number
> of users using Win98 and maybe WinME.
> 
> I guess we could add support for features that only work on some Windows
> platforms, but I'd rather not do that until we're not officially saying
> that R runs on Win9x.
> 
> Duncan Murdoch
>