Hi, I am learning julia, and thought I would practice by migrating some of my code from R. I run into the problem that the data structures in julia does not seem to offer row names? I looked here in the forum and found a 2 year old discussion, that seems to end of the, IMHO slightly imprecise opinion that rownames are a misfeature (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/julia-users/rownames$20matrix/julia-users/OFbnNLPdWOc/qTnhlm33YzMJ). Of course, in DataFrame it is always possible to add another column with names, and use this by convention, though it does preclude the nice behaviour of automatically extracting a Named Array with appropriate names when extracting a column.
Worse is the case for data matrices, that do not support multiple types. Take for instance an ecological community matrix, that has species as columns, sites as rows, and is filled with integers counting the abundance of individuals. Subsetting a column gives the occupancy of a species, subsetting a row gives the species community in a site. Having row and column names, and being able to index into the array on names, is a really important feature! How would this be implemented in julia? Is there still a conviction that row names are a misfeature, and why? Thanks!
