[johnwilkesbooth]

> No distinction between categorical data and strings. R thinks your strings are categories, and Pandas thinks your categories are strings.

I think this is more of an R-ism than a standardization issue. Strings are a pretty universal data type, where as categorical data (factors) are mostly specific to the domain of statistical modeling. IMO Python is doing the correct thing here. Personally I find factors to be more trouble than they are worth, and fortunately `data.table::fread` mimics Python in this regard.