> (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