[agentq]

My programming background is fairly extensive in non-functional languages. I work in finance, and the company I joined uses R for a considerable amount of model prototyping.

I'd really like to switch to Python+numpy/scipy, but I haven't been able to find an equivalent of a data.frame, or some numeric+string data structure that allows for easy slicing on both.

Does anybody have any suggestions?

[etal]

Does numpy's record array do what you want?

http://www.scipy.org/RecordArrays

It doesn't quite have first-class status in the library the way data.frame does in R, but it does let you index an array using strings.

[agentq]

Thanks, I'll check it out!

[wildanimal]

I'm having the same problem. R is slow; yet R's plyr, reshape, and lattice packages are indispensable (ggplot2 wasn't quite mature enough when I wanted to learn it). Maybe something could be written around record/structured arrays. (I'm halfway inclined to try...)