"Numerical Recipes in C" is nonportable code

[Rob Carriere]

In article <8400 at smoke.ARPA> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
>In article <547 at accelerator.eng.ohio-state.edu> rob at 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.

Trivial refutation time!  Surely it is obvious that ``numerical
problems'' forms a (large) superset of ``array/matrix code'' as far as
numerical analysis is concerned?

Believe it or not, but there are *many* algorithms out there where
it's either base-1 indexing or index arithmatic all over the place.
Not with your traditional LU-decomposition stuff and so on, but with
algorithms where the contents or properties of the matrix elements are
computed from the indeces.

Rob Carriere