Gabor Grothendieck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > OK. I guess you want one of the core people to respond but in the > interim can you explain the terminology "loop"? > Also, do you have any prototypical applications in mind?
"loop" is short for "loopback". A loop or loopback device is one that just returns the data sent to it. The prototypical applications are the same sort of applications text connections are used for: data transformation, in this case of raw binary data, rather than formatted text data. In my case, I needed to interpret a "long raw" column from an Oracle table, that consisted of packed single precision floating point numbers. The caTools package on CRAN includes less capable raw2bin and bin2raw functions, used to implement Base64 encoders and decoders. -- Dave ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
