yes, the term 'higher order function' may have been misleading here.

So, the C code doesn't actually do anything to ensure that you don't overwrite an array. So they're not writing extra code to make a vector type. Thats not the reason.

And my point was that, yes, there is a lot of funcionality built into matlab thats not built into C, but, this code doesn't use any of it. The thing that it could be doing is replacing loops with matrix operations, but my matlab code doesn't do that. The python code does, and its still longer.