Re: rewrite of structs - advice sought

[fork]

John W. Eaton <jwe <at> octave.org> writes:

> | 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.
> 
> There is nothing preventing you
> from writing and contributing a set of
> functions for reading R-like data
> frames (even R data files) into some
> kind of struct- or cell-array data 
> structure with all the appropriate
> tags and data included in one object.
>  But I think that overloading
> Octave's load function for that purpose
> is not the right thing to do.

That is a very appropriate response -- however, while I
could probably code up whatever, I haven't a clue about 
a good design for a general data frame-ish approach....  
If anyone has any ideas, I would love to hear them (in the 
Python world, I think this conversation would be facilitated
 by the use of PEPs, RFC like things....)

And yes -- leave load() alone -- it would be no good having 
the same function name doing non-standard stuff.