[Bioc-devel] read.AnnotatedDataFrame

[Seth Falcon]

Florian Hahne <f.hahne at dkfz-heidelberg.de> writes:
> I'm not sure about having the sample names as row.names, though. I think
> there used to be a mandatory column "name" to store them, which I
> personally liked better (in many spreadsheet programs the concept of row
> names is somewhat vague...) . 

Interesting.  The row names are special since they must often be aligned with
other object and can be used for subsetting.  

I have no problem with a "name" column being recognized by an import
tool (aside from issues of name collisions -- what if I have a
variable named "name").  But I think performance concerns will move us
away from having such a column in the actual representation of the
object.

What we are moving towards is a setup where the row names are stored
in a separate slot and may eventually be an external vector that can
be shared among other objects that need to align on that vector.

+ seth