Mathematica 7 compares to other languages

[George Neuner]

On Thu, 11 Dec 2008 10:41:59 -0800 (PST), Xah Lee <xahlee at gmail.com>
wrote:

>On Dec 10, 2:47 pm, John W Kennedy <jwke... at attglobal.net> wrote:
>> Xah Lee wrote:
>> > In lisp, python, perl, etc, you'll have 10 or so lines. In C or Java,
>> > you'll have 50 or hundreds lines.
>>
>> C:
>>
>> #include <stdlib.h>
>> #include <math.h>
>>
>> void normal(int dim, float* x, float* a) {
>>     float sum = 0.0f;
>>     int i;
>>     float divisor;
>>     for (i = 0; i < dim; ++i) sum += x[i] * x[i];
>>     divisor = sqrt(sum);
>>     for (i = 0; i < dim; ++i) a[i] = x[i]/divisor;
>>
>> }
>
>i don't have experience coding C. 

Then why do you talk about it as if you know something?

>The code above doesn't seems to satisfy the spec.

It does.

>The input should be just a vector, array, list, or
>whatever the lang supports. The output is the same 
>datatype of the same dimension.

C's native arrays are stored contiguously.  Multidimensional arrays
can be accessed as a vector of length (dim1 * dim2 * ... * dimN).

This code handles arrays of any dimensionality.  The poorly named
argument 'dim' specifies the total number of elements in the array.

George