Tim Churches <tchur@optushome.com.au>: [snip]
Have a look at the discussion on RecordArrays in this overview of Numarray: http://stsdas.stsci.edu/numarray/DesignOverview.html
Sounds interesting.
However, in the meantime, as you note, its not too hard to write a class which emulates R/S-Plus data frames. Just store each column in its own Numeric array of the appropriate type
Yeah -- it's just that I'd like to keep a set of columns collected as a two-dimensional array, to allow horizontal summing and the like. (Not much more complicated, but an extra issue to address.)
(which might be the PyObject types, which can hold any Python object type),
Hm. Yes. I can't seem to find these anymore. I seem to recall using type='o' or something in Numeric, but I can't find the right type objects now... (Guess I'm just reading the docs and dir(numeric) poorly...) It would be nice if array(['foo']) just worked. Oh, well. [snip]
Happy to collaborate on furthering this idea.
That would be great (even though I don't really have any time to use for this -- it's just a really tiny part of a small project I'm working on :)
By memory-mapping disc-based versions of the Numeric arrays, and using the BsdDb3 record number database format for the string columns, you can even make a disc-based "record array" which can be larger than available RAM+swap.
Sounds quite useful, although quite similar to MetaKit. (I suppose I could use some functions from numarray on columns in MetaKit... But that might just be too weird -- and it would still just be a collection of columns :]) [snip] Thanks for your input. -- Magnus Lie Hetland http://hetland.org