A common situation I run into in my finite element codes is the need to have offset indexed arrays. This can happen if a mesh consists of both straight-edges and curved edges triangles, then the offsets effectively tell you how many vertices are used in the representation of the curves and you can then interpolate them as you like. It also arises in the situation of "p"- adaptive finite elements, where the polynomial order may be variable over the domain.
In both of these situations it is desirable to maintain data contiguity because in the end things will be passed to many "black-box" linear algebra routines which often have as an implicit assumption that the data is contiguous in memory. I have created a simple library for handling this situation here: https://github.com/ReidAtcheson/NonuniformArray.jl Is there perhaps a more appropriate way to handle this that I am unaware of? Would others find this kind of library useful, and if so perhaps know how it could be "canonicalized" to behave in a more proper Julia way (if it does not already). Thank you, -Reid
