Ebook: Numerical Recipes in PASCAL - The Art of Scientific Computing

This book is supposed to teach you methods of numerical computing which are practical, efficient, and (insofar as possible) elegant. We presume throughout this book that you, the reader, have particular tasks that you
want to get done. We view our job as educating you on how to proceed.

Occasionally we may try to reroute you briefly onto a particularly beautiful side road; but by and large, we will travel with you along main highways that lead to practical destinations. Throughout this book, you will find us fearlessly editorializing, telling you what you should and shouldn't do. This prescriptive tone results from a
conscious decision on our part, and we hope that you will not find it irritating.

We do not claim that our advice is infallible! Rather, we are reacting against a tendency, in the textbook literature of computation, to discuss every possible method that has ever been invented, without ever offering a practical judgment on relative merit. We do, therefore, offer you our practical judgments whenever we can. As you gain experience, you will form your own opinion of how reliable our advice is.

We presume that you are able to read computer programs in Pascal. In this edition of Numerical Recipes that is the language in which all the "recipes" are implemented. If you are more comfortable with FORTRAN or C, you will find other editions of the book in those languages. The various editions are quite similar with respect to mathematical and algorithmic content. Moreover, we have chosen our programming conventions to accentuate the similarities between languages. If you are multilingual, any single edition should suffice.