alanm@cognos.UUCP (Alan Myrvold) (10/12/89)
There's been another (well deserved) round of bashing in comp.lang.c for the way "Numerical Recipes" dynamically allocates matrices. It is kinda too bad that they picked such an ugly (and illegal) way to handle matrices and vectors. I have their book (in FORTRAN) and find it a nice readable introduction to many numerical methods. Had they chosen a reasonable style, it might have become commonplace. So my question is, what C style SHOULD become commonplace for allocating matrices : 1) Encapsulate size and data into a struct : typedef struct { int row,col; double **x; } matrix; 2) Allocate a matrix as a vector and do arithmetic in subscript calculations (like Fortran, but the C compiler probably won't optimize the loops as well as Fortran). typedef double *matrix; x = malloc(row*col*sizeof(double)); x[j*row+i] = 3.0; 3) K&R style 2-d matrices -- number of rows required to free matrix typedef double **matrix; matrix mat_alloc(row,col) int row,col; { matrix x; x = (double **) malloc(row*sizeof(double *)); for (i = 0; i < row; i++) x[i] = (double *) malloc(col*sizeof(double)); return x; } void free_mat(x,row) matrix x; int row; { for (i = row-1; i >= 0; i--) free(x[i]); free(x); } 4) 2-d matrices -- number of rows NOT required to free matrix typedef double **matrix; matrix mat_alloc(row,col) int row,col; { matrix x; x = (double **) malloc((row+1)*sizeof(double *)); for (i = 0; i < row; i++) x[i] = (double *) malloc(col*sizeof(double)); x[row] = NULL; return x; } void free_mat(x) matrix x; { matrix y; for (y = x; *y; y++) free(*y); free(x); } 5) Are there any other styles commonly used for non-sparse matrices in C ??? --- Alan Myrvold 3755 Riverside Dr. uunet!mitel!sce!cognos!alanm Cognos Incorporated P.O. Box 9707 alanm@cognos.uucp (613) 738-1440 x5530 Ottawa, Ontario CANADA K1G 3Z4