Thanks for the response. Still not sure I understand what you mean. readcsv returns Array{T, 2} where T is determined form the file ... so the type of the output does change based on the file. Since column vectors are thought of as 1-d arrays in Julia I would have assumed the Julian way to load a column is to return Array{T,1}. I was just suggesting that readcsv would just return Array{T,d} where T and d are appropriately determined form the file.
Anyhoo, I guess there must be a reason it works the way it does but the whole readcsv(...)[:] thing seemed an unnecessary overhead so I thought I would check to see if I'm using the wrong command.