Is it a public C API to R connection? I couldn't find any. Can I use the *Rconnection in user C code? Instead of straight fopen, I would like the ability to read in compressed file (gz, bz2), remote file, etc, using the implementation that R already has, with a uniformed interface. Also it would be nice to open the file/connect in R and handle any exceptions/errors in R but do the actually reading in C (I'm dealing with a binary format). Thanks, Michael