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8.2 Blocks

For consistency all memory is allocated through a gsl_block structure. The structure contains two components, the size of an area of memory and a pointer to the memory. The gsl_block structure looks like this,

typedef struct
{
  size_t size;
  double * data;
} gsl_block;

Vectors and matrices are made by slicing an underlying block. A slice is a set of elements formed from an initial offset and a combination of indices and step-sizes. In the case of a matrix the step-size for the column index represents the row-length. The step-size for a vector is known as the stride.

The functions for allocating and deallocating blocks are defined in the header file ‘gsl_block.h’