[MATRIX-SIG] Proposal: "Tables" in NumPy

[David Ascher]

On Fri, 25 Jul 1997, Jim Phillips wrote:

> I do sympathize with this problem.  I would really love to see something
> higher level than an array, perhaps called a "table", which could be
> indexed as a dictionary (columns by heading) in some dimensions, and as
> an array (rows by index) in others.  This would really simplify data
> storage since one could label data and access it without worrying about
> which column "pressure" is.  Pickled tables would also be self
> documenting! 

This is one of the features of the S+ data.frame object, which is the
topic of another thread on this SIG.  For anyone interested in this, I
recommend finding and reading Chapter 3 of "Statistical Models in S", by
John M. Chambers and Trevor J. Hastie.  You don't really need to know
anything about statistics, but the chapter will explain what one (IMHO,
very good) solution to this problem looks like.  We can't do all of
data.frame in Python (due to a few general syntactic issues such as the
mechanism behind comparisons and the way indexing works), but we can get a
lot of it done w/ the right class wrappers.

It's yet another one of my long-term projects, but it's still in the
design phase.

--david


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