search for: datadump

Hello all: I'm hoping you can help me determine the source of this problem. I've just used read.csv to bring a small (581 rows, 9 vars) dataset into R (2.7.0., Mac OS 10.5.5). The dataset was created in Excel 2008 from a datadump from an Oracle database. I've done this many times before and had no problems. The dataset ("a") appears to have extra rows filled with NAs. For example, > a[a$mmt.dose == 10, ] ID COHORT F st.y st.m st.d days md mmt.dose NA NA <NA> <NA> NA NA...

...scalars? (I know that R/S don't have scalars, but other systems/applications do.) Can we think of a core set of "basic" data types (factors, strings, integers, etc.) from which to build on other, possibly recursive types (perhaps similar to corba's IDL basic data types or S's datadump?). Would it make sense to imagine, say xlispstat/python/java applications reading and interpreting an StatDataML document without serious difficulties? My gut feeling (which is often wrong) is that the DTD should make the data self-describing: e.g., the factor "machineId" has leve...