[Rd] Possible changes to connections

[Seth Falcon]

Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:
> When I originally implemented connections in R 1.2.0, I followed the model 
> in the 'Green Book' closely.  There were a number of features that forced 
> a particular implementation, and one was getConnection() that allows one 
> to recreate a connection object from a number.
>
> I am wondering if anyone makes use of this, and if so for what?

I don't see any uses of it in the Bioconductor package sources.

> It would seem closer to the R philosophy to have connection objects that 
> get garbage collected when no R object refers to them.  This would allow 
> for example
>
> readLines(gzfile("foo.gz"))

I think this would be a nice improvement as it matches what many
people already assume happens as well as matches what some other
languages do (in particular, Python).

+ seth

-- 
Seth Falcon | Computational Biology | Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
http://bioconductor.org