I reverted the name of the tty connection that I described previously, to "serial" connection and updated the patch to R 2.11.1. This name is more appropriate to its function and also makes way for another patch I am working on which implements the full POSIX terminal interface (essentially all of termios.h). The connection provided in the new patch will be more appropriately named a tty connection. I think this type of connection could serve a variety of purposes. Most of the items below are motivated from recent R-help and R-devel posts.

• serial communications (a superset of the serial connection)
• additional route for client/server communications (iPad/iPhone?)
• access to data collection devices that emulate a tty layer (e.g. USB GPS)
• user keyboard input manipulation
• input/timeout operations
• improved implementation of "terminal" connections