[R] column name handling and long labels

[Werner Wernersen]

Hi,

I have two loosely related questions which could make
my live again a bit easier:

1) Is there a simple way to select a range of columns
in a data frame using column names? 
I am thinking of something like mydf[1,"col4":"col8"]

2) I have a data frame with many columns and they all
have short variable names which is good in most cases
but sometimes it would be nice to have also a longer
descriptive name / label attached to the variable
which could then be used for printing and latex
output. Has anybody come up with a convenient way to
do that?
Right now, I am using always match or merge in case of
row names.

Many thanks,
  Werner