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From: vkr@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath K. Rao)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: "Numerical Recipes in C" is nonportable code
Message-ID: <868@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 2 Sep 88 18:57:29 GMT
References: <664@lindy.Stanford.EDU> <6758@megaron.arizona.edu> <718@gtx.com> <8400@smoke.ARPA>
Organization: Ohio State Math-Stats Dept
Lines: 17

In article <8400@smoke.ARPA>, gwyn@smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) writes:
> 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.

A mathematician is one who starts counting at 0 :-)
Historically, people were suspicious of 'nothing' which is why 0 was not
a number by itself (as opposed to being used in place value notation) till
about 6th century A.D.
As far as indexing goes where one starts makes a difference in terms of
typography :-) More seriously, one may have several things to be indexed,
over a big range (-infinity to infinity even) and each thing is indexed
over some subrange not starting at 0. Changing every origin to 0 is
painful and likely to lead to bugs. Ideally this must be fixed up at the
preprocessor level than at code level. Anybody want to write these
macros?
-Nath
vkr@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu