Re: dataframe dereferencing

[CdeMills]

I'm happy to see discussions about the dataframe concept. Regarding cell
output format, the problems is as follows. After selecting some sub-range of
size mxn, we may or may not need some extra information in order to rebuild
a full dataframe for it. If we don't care, a cell array of size mxn, is just
fine, this is the purpose of df.as.cell. If we care, then headers are added
as two lines with column names and types as strings, and two columns with ID
as unsigned int and row name as string. This compound table can't not just
be further dereferenced, as the real content is offseted by two lines and
two columns. The operations of sub-ranging and cell conversion can thus not
be performed separately, this is the logic behind
df.cell(some range). It results in one call to subsref, all the accessors
being packed together. 

As a said, a dataframe should mimic as much as possible a matrix. If
a=randn(3, 3), then you can't say
cell(a). You have to explicitly call 'mat2cell'. This is why something
cell(df) looks a bit strange to me, besides the problem of not separating
subranging and output type conversion.

Jaroslav, could you point us to some source of information about this
concept of cs-list ?

Regards

Pascal 
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