[erlang-questions] Understanding recursion

[Henning Diedrich]

I second the premise.

But the 0-case is missing. You basically proposed:

     grok(understood) -> ok.

     grok(Prereq) -> grok(Prereq).

Which is a dead loop for Prereq /= understood, as the jokes it inspired 
demonstrate.

There is hope though, I was allowed to hear the sense of wonder first 
hand when a CS student discovered that on machine code level recursions 
really become iterations. I am pretty sure the newest generation of 
programmers have recursion hardwired now, for skipping all the low level 
stuff and starting out with functional languages (not kidding).

Henning

On 5/19/11 2:58 PM, Joe Armstrong wrote:
> I think how we teach recursion is wrong.
>
> Understanding recursion is really easy,
> all you have to do is understand recursion.
>
> /Joe
>
>
>
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