Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!haven!umd5!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: "Numerical Recipes in C" is nonportable code
Message-ID: <8400@smoke.ARPA>
Date: 31 Aug 88 10:23:33 GMT
References: <664@lindy.Stanford.EDU> <6758@megaron.arizona.edu> <718@gtx.com> <13258@mimsy.UUCP> <531@accelerator.eng.ohio-state.edu> <1673@dataio.Data-IO.COM> <547@accelerator.eng.ohio-state.edu>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 11

In article <547@accelerator.eng.ohio-state.edu> rob@kaa.eng.ohio-state.edu (Rob Carriere) writes:
>The problem is that the authors of Numerical Recipes (NR) observe,
>correctly, that many numerical problems are naturally non-zero based.

INcorrectly!  I've written a lot of array/matrix code in both
Fortran and C, and have found that it normally doesn't matter
and in those cases where it does matter, it doesn't matter much.

I've known mathematicians who have switched over to starting
enumerating at 0 instead of 1.  They argued that THAT was "more
natural".  One can certainly get used to either convention.