Re: displaying structures array as table

[fork]

CdeMills <Pascal.Dupuis <at> worldonline.be> writes:

>  What I would
> like is to concatenate a number of numeric values together in a matrix-like
> fashion, but be able to give some signification for each line: the name of
> the first should be 'fmin', the name of the second 'fnext', and so on. Added
> benefit is that 'a(2).fmin' doesn't need to be rewritten when fields are
> added/deleted, while a(2, 1) would change if I decide to insert a line
> before the first one.
> 
> For my request to work, this implies all fields to be similar. Any interest
> in this idea ?

(Forgive me if the following is non-germane.)

What about a function to display heterogeneous data stored in a struct-array? 
The code could use the first few rows of the struct array to infer types and
lengths, build a format string therefrom, and then loop over the rest.  Using
the first few rows seems sort of "cheesy", but is necessary unless one keeps
some sort of metadata saying what the types are (which would probably be a thing
for objects and classes).  One could fairly easily write the inverse function
that parses a text table in the same format and stores a struct array (good for
testing, too).

(Maybe you want something more than display? Honestly displaying heterogeneous
data is the only reason I miss R.)

Then you could have something like the following:

a(1).label = 'first';  a(1).x = 1; a(1).y=10;
a(2).label = 'second'; a(2).x = 2; a(2).y=25;

> dispt(a)

label   x  y
------------
first   1 10
second  2 25