preserve old (pre 3.1.0) type.convert behavior

Question

R 3.1.0 is out and one of the new features is the following:

type.convert() (and hence by default read.table()) returns a ch

Answer 1

Since I don't have rep to comment on Brian Diggs's response - for future reference, the new argument is now called "numerals" (not "exact"). From http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/NEWS.R-3.1.0patched.html:

type.convert(), read.table() and similar read.*() functions get a new numerals argument, specifying how numeric input is converted when its conversion to double precision loses accuracy. The default numerals = "allow.loss" allows accuracy loss, as in R versions before 3.1.0.