[R] tried half-precision but "size 2 is unknown on this machine"

[Mike Miller]

It's an IEEE standard format:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-precision_floating-point_format#IEEE_754_half-precision_binary_floating-point_format:_binary16

This is what I see:

> writeBin(vec , con, size=2 )
Error in writeBin(vec, con, size = 2) : size 2 is unknown on this machine

I'm not sure what the machine has to do with it.  It's really up to the 
software, isn't it?

Is there a way to get R to read/write half-precision numbers (binary16)?

It isn't a big deal for me because unsigned 16-bit integers are working 
well enough, but I'd like to have an answer for people who ask why I make 
them divide by 1000 all the time.  ;-)

Mike