Hi conitec,
I see that you are improving the string functions in the latest beta by str_to_int and str_to_float and I appreciate this development! Now it would be even greater if you could also improve the file_var_read function and may introduce new functions like file_int_read and file_float_read for passing longs or floats through external files (if you haven't planned this so far).
Of course corresponding writing functions would be nice as well

I've added corresponding write functions. For a file, you can use file_str_write/readto and then convert the strings.