[R] Create a matrix with increment and element with zero subscript

[S Ellison]

 R. Michael Weylandt wrote:
> 
> This may be an unnecessary aside, but other than obfuscating 
> code or allowing people to never stop thinking in C and start 
> thinking in R, what practical purpose would this package 
> serve in an R context?
> 

I'd think about constructs like 
income[1990:2010]

which work nicely with arbitrary indexing. (Oarray isn;t just 0)

Fortran has it natively; C doesn't, but it was useful enough for Numerical Recipes to provide code for arbitrary array index origin for C arrays (it used a pointer shift, if I recall correctly). The most obvious native R appraoch I can think of is using names (eg income[paste(1990:2010)] ), which is very general but has its own disadvantages in terms of readability and, maybe, speed. 

 S Ellison
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