[Rd] read, write generics?

[Matt Shotwell]

R-devel list,

I'm working on a wrapper for R to the POSIX terminal interface. I'd like
to make this code available as a package (as well as a connection
patch).

The 'seek', 'truncate', 'flush', 'open', and 'close' generic functions
are a great help for the packaged interface. The only two missing are
'read' and 'write' generics, but I realize write is currently a wrapper
to 'cat'.

What are your thoughts on adding 'read', and converting 'write' to
generics in a manner similar to 'seek' and friends?

Also, I'd like to use R's 'iconv' function to re-encode text from tty
data, but this is apparently restricted to character encodings that do
not permit embedded NUL characters. I wrote to R-devel about this
earlier [1], with potential solution. Any thoughts on this?

-Matt

[1] http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/e10/devel/10/06/0648.html

-- 
Matthew S. Shotwell
Graduate Student
Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology
Medical University of South Carolina