I can't speak for Jens and others directly involved in development, but I think it has always been pretty easy to get EpiData data files into R by exporting to Stata. Stata into R is easy.
This is an interesting posting by Pedro as I went through the same thinking about 10 years ago and talked about this with Mark Myatt. We had talked about putting a graphical interface onto R that would be as easy to use as EpiData, giving the power of R underneath. That's fine for analysis, and there are many analyses, especially modelling, that I would do in R by preference. However, I would never try to produce a food-specific attack rate table or even attempt to manage outbreak data in R.
I am also intrigued by the possibilities, as Pedro points out, once EpiData source is released and a means of plugging in other functions is available. That way, it should be relatively easy to have R do some difficult things in the background while the user can take advantage of the EpiData interface.
Jamie
On 2010-09-23, Pedro wrote:
Thus I would not be surprised if one day EpiData friends also start an integration with R, as already has been done for SAS, SPSS, WinBugs, SQL, MySQL etc etc and more recently it seems that epiinfo too.