I like how easy it is to import data in R and Octave. (See [1] for a typical workflow.) Since I couldn’t find any matching library on Hackage, I cooked up my own [2] in a couple of days. Here’s an example. Let’s start by creating a poorly formatted dataset: $ cat > test.txt One Two Longish Four Foo 1 -2 3.0 4.0 Looooooong 5.0 6.0 -72.0 8.0 Baz 41.0 4.2324234e7 43.0 1.111111144E-12 Then we parse it with ‘readFile’, mangle the data a bit, and display in GHCi: λ> import qualified Data.Packed.LMatrix.IO as L λ> import qualified Data.Packed.LMatrix as L λ> do m <- L.readFile "test.txt"; return . L.trans . L.reverseRows $ L.map (+1) m (4><3) Baz Looooooong Foo One 42.0 6.0 2.0 Two 4.2324235e7 7.0 -1.0 Longish 44.0 -71.0 4.0 Four 1.0000000000011111 9.0 5.0 Now I’m wondering how to make it better. I’m planning to add the documentation, augment the parser to accept CSV, and maybe support other matrix libraries. What’s missing? Would you like to see it on Hackage? And if not, why? [1] http://astrostatistics.psu.edu/su09/lecturenotes/pca.html [2] https://gitorious.org/hmatrix-labeled