In article <40FE2A18.302 / hypermetrics.com>,
  Hal Fulton <hal9000 / hypermetrics.com> writes:

> How much work is it to implement this method? I may not be
> knowledgeable enough to do it myself, but I would be willing
> to assist someone if I can.

See [ruby-dev:23247] and [ruby-dev:23248].

However now I think readpartial should raise EOFError on EOF.
The implementation in [ruby-dev:23247] returns nil on EOF.
-- 
Tanaka Akira