Pandas like features

[bachmeier]

On Thursday, 5 November 2020 at 20:22:45 UTC, data pulverizer 
wrote:

> 1. If I had to do this, I would first decide on a collection of 
> common data structures to share starting with *compositions* of 
> R/Python/Julia style multi-dimensional arrays - contiguous 
> arrays with basic element types with a dimensional information 
> in form of another array. So a 2x3 double matrix is a double 
> array of length 6 with another long array containing [2, 3]. R 
> has externalptr, Julia can interface with pointers, as can 
> Python.

R has externalptr, but to my knowledge, that's only for 
transporting around C objects. I don't know of any way to call R 
API functions with data not allocated by R. It assumes it can do 
anything it wants with that data. Unless they've changed 
something (which is possible since I haven't looked into it in 
years) you'd have to copy any data you send to an R function. But 
if you're calling R maybe you don't care about that.