slightly speeding up readChar()

| > I'm not sure it's really worth bothering with such optimizations, on my machine I get
| 
| No it isn't worth it, you're right. Though 100MB is much smaller than my average file size. But you're right, readChar is quite efficient.

When you know the (fixed) structure of the data, the CRAN package mmap can be
a huge winner.

Dirk

Gauss once played himself in a zero-sum game and won $50.
                      -- #11 at http://www.gaussfacts.com