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While scalar languages like C do not have native array programming elements as part of the language proper, this does not mean programs written in these languages never take advantage of the underlying techniques of vectorization (i.e., utilizing a CPU's vector-based instructions if it has them or by using multiple CPU cores).
Some programming languages provide operations that return the size (number of elements) of a vector, or, more generally, range of each index of an array. In C and C++ arrays do not support the size function, so programmers often have to declare separate variable to hold the size, and pass it to procedures as a separate parameter.
For example, to perform an element by element sum of two arrays, a and b to produce a third c, it is only necessary to write c = a + b In addition to support for vectorized arithmetic and relational operations, these languages also vectorize common mathematical functions such as sine. For example, if x is an array, then y = sin (x)
Here, c[i:i+3] represents the four array elements from c[i] to c[i+3] and the vector processor can perform four operations for a single vector instruction. Since the four vector operations complete in roughly the same time as one scalar instruction, the vector approach can run up to four times faster than the original code.
Common examples of array slicing are extracting a substring from a string of characters, the "ell" in "hello", extracting a row or column from a two-dimensional array, or extracting a vector from a matrix. Depending on the programming language, an array slice can be made out of non-consecutive
The base index of an array can be freely chosen. Usually programming languages allowing n-based indexing also allow negative index values and other scalar data types like enumerations, or characters may be used as an array index. Using zero based indexing is the design choice of many influential programming languages, including C, Java and Lisp ...
Programming languages or their standard libraries that support multi-dimensional arrays typically have a native row-major or column-major storage order for these arrays. Row-major order is used in C / C++ / Objective-C (for C-style arrays), PL/I , [ 4 ] Pascal , [ 5 ] Speakeasy , [ citation needed ] and SAS .
Intrinsic functions are often used to explicitly implement vectorization and parallelization in languages which do not address such constructs. Some application programming interfaces (API), for example, AltiVec and OpenMP, use intrinsic functions to declare, respectively, vectorizable and multiprocessing-aware operations during compiling.