[R] naive question

[Igor Rivin]

I did read the Import/Export document. It is true that replacing
the read.table by read.csv and setting the commentChar="" speeds
things up some (a factor of two?) -- this is very far from acceptable performance,
being some two orders of magnitude worse than SAS (the IO of which is, in turn, much worse
than that of the unix utilities (awk, sort, and so on))   . Setting colClasses is suggested
(and has been suggested by some in response to my question), but for 
a frame with some 60 columns, this is a major nuisance.