I may be wrong, but I have the feeling that this is very close to Table I/O, for which I've opened a task in the task tracker that I'm slowly working on:
http://savannah.gnu.org/task/?15419

As to spreadsheet I/O in core, IMO that is a very delicate subject. It looks simple but has many concealed gotchas. We should discuss it first in the maintainers ML, but as far as I'm concerned such a discussion had better happen in December or even later as I have too many other distractions ATM.

Release -> dev

Starting with this year's Matlab Version R2019a the new function "readmatrix" was introduced by Mathworks. They now marked the good old "csvread" and "dlmread" with the following comments:

Not recommended starting in R2019a

csvread is not recommended. Use readmatrix instead. There are no plans to remove csvread.

(Same for dlmread.)

I think we should

• add readmatrix to the list of "unimplemented" functions in Octave, soon.

• Consider creating an Octave version of readmatrix in the future. Since importing csv data files is in my understanding a core functionality of Octave. (Before processing your data, you need to first import it.) And Matlab users will probably change over to this readmatrix function during the years to come.

But creating a "readmatrix" function seems to not only be a wrapper around any existing Octave function. They support quite many (useful?) options in ths new function readmatrix.