[BioC] rhdf5 and factors

[Stephen Eglen]

> (ii) inter-language exchange of data

hi Wolfgang, Bernd,

Item (ii) above I think would be very useful.  Doug Bates recently
asked on the Julia email list about ways of getting data between R and
Julia, and hdf5 would seem ideal.  (Tim Holy at Wash U has done a
great deal of work such that I think hdf5 will be Julia's native
format for saving data.)  I think I pointed Doug in the direction of
rhdf5.

I also spoke to another colleague before Christmas who has just
finished writing a decent R package, and for now saves all the output
from his program in the .Rdata format; This is great for R users, but
not so useful for people who want to do further analysis in other
languages (Julia, Python, matlab).  HDF5 seems to me to be a very
useful way to go to allow data from R to be exported.

I am really glad to see that you are thinking about these cases -- I'm
happy to help test features (e.g. to check how well R--Julia can talk
with each other via HDF5.)

Stephen