co-processes and bash (ksh does it, can bash?)

[Larry Williamson]

Ksh supports the concept of a co-process. You can start a process in
the background with it's stdin and stdout connected to the shell. You
do this by putting the |& operator after the command. You can then use
read -p to read from the co-process and print -p to write to it.

I don't see any mention of this nice feature in the BASH
documentation.

Is there any plan to support this in the future?

Is there some other, more general procedure, by which this same
feature could be accomplished?

-Larry