I am most of the way through porting the Becker/Wilks code to R and I will
be finishing this some time in the next few months. Fritz Leisch has also
expressed an interest and I passed what I had along to him. The remaining
problems to solve are:
1. Thinning the polygons which make up the map (so they will print in
postscript).
2. Assembling a reasonable collection of map projections.
There is nothing difficult in this, its just a matter of finding a few
days to do the job.
In addition I'm looking at putting a better set of maps together (I'm
expecting the US National Imagery and Mapping Agency 4 CD set to show up
on my doorstep at any minute).