R devel - Mar 2011 - Suggestion: quote POSIXlt and POSIXct in write.table()

Currently, if you call write.table() on a data.frame that includes a POSIXlt or
POSIXct variable, with the default options (space delimited), you won't then
be able to read that file back in using read.table because the POSIXlt and
POSIXct won't get quoted, and they contain a space in them when written to
the file.

For an example, see:
https://gist.github.com/881799

A one line change to write.table() to quote POSIXlt and POSIXct by default can
fix this:

      if (qset) 
            quote <- if (length(x)) 
                which(unlist(lapply(x, function(x) is.character(x) || 
-                  is.factor(x))))
+                  is.factor(x) || is(x, "POSIXlt") || is(x,
"POSIXct"))))
            else numeric(0L)

I get all the theoretical reasons for why this shouldn't be a big deal (I
could use read.csv and write.csv instead of read.table and write.table, or
convert to character before writing if I was set on using write.table), but this
is the sort of thing that just confuses people with limited upside. I can't
think of a way in which this change would break anyone's legacy code.

Best,
Noah
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