read.table() and precision?

Dear List,

Following the below question I have a question of my
own:
Suppose that I have large matrices which are produced
sequentially and must be used sequentially in the
reverse order. I do not have enough memory to store
them and so I would like to write them to disk and
then read them. This raises two questions:
1) what is the fastest (and the most economic
space-wise) way to do this?
2) functions like write, write.table, etc. write the
data the way it is printed and this may result in a
loss of accuracy. Is there any way to prevent this,
except for setting the "digits" option to a higher
value or using format prior to writing the data? Is it
possible to write binary files (similar to Fortran)?

Any suggestion will be greatly appreciated.

Hi,

I'm currently working with data that has values as
large as 99,000,000
but is accurate to 6 decimal places. Unfortunately,
when I load the
data using read.table(), it rounds everything to the
nearest integer.
Is there any way for me to preserve the information
or work with
arbitrarily large floating point numbers?

Thank you,
Wojciech

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