Re: rewrite of structs - advice sought

[fork]

> May I suggest enhancing the
> | basic load and save operation, implementing something similar to R data
> | frame, which are:
> |   A data frame, a matrix-like structure whose columns may be of differing
> | types (numeric, logical, factor and character and so on).
> | 
> | Basically, load and save should try to return a structure array in case of a
> | first non-comment line of fields name, a matrix if all values are of similar
> | types, and an error code otherwise ?

(this should be a different thread if we really want to pursue it)

data.frames (and smart categorical data handling) are some of the few things I
miss about R.  It is really nice to be able to write

data[10:15, 'colname']

and get something reasonable.

> Feel free to enter a feature request in the bug tracker, but please
> remember that Octave is developed by volunteers and you may have to
> provide some additional incentive to get someone interested in working
> on a particular project.

If there were a well designed data.frame-ish idea, I think it would be fairly
easy (as in 100 lines or so) to write an m-function to handle the OP's basic
idea for importing.  We have scanf and split functions...

> Also, we have compatibility with Matlab (not R) to consider.  Perhaps
> it would be best if someone were to write a function for Octave that
> is compatible with Matlab's importdata function.

While this would be cool, it wouldn't address the issue of different column
types or column names.  Unless I am misreading the online docs.  

And I personally think sophisticated data-handling would be a good reason to
allow non-TMW based functions and protocols.  I am all for Octave being a strict
superset of matlab, and in this case there is no good matlab approach.

My rather vague $0.02