[erlang-questions] Erlang for youngsters

[Miles Fidelman]

On Thursday, June 19, 2014 8:32:59 PM UTC-5, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
>
>     > Evgeny M writes:
>     >> Recursion is hard in any language without pattern matching.
>
>     I don't believe that.  Decades ago I was using languages like Algol,
>     Lisp, Pop-2, in all of which pattern matching was entirely absent
>     yet recursion was easy.
>
>     I'm reminded of Susan's classroom.  I think it's in "The Thief of
>     Time."
>     The quote goes something like this:
>      she hadn't told the children algebra was hard,
>      so they never found out.
>

Whoa that brings me back.

The first program I ever wrote was a general purpose solution to the 
Tower of Hanoi (generate sequence of moves for a stack of n disks). A 
problem that's trivial if you understand recursion.

But... I was writing in Basic.... early Basic - no subroutine 
capabilities, global variables only.  Somehow I ended up building a 
stack mechanism, and implementing some form of recursion in it.  A lot 
of muddling toward a solution.  Learned a lot.

Cheers,

Miles Fidelman



-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra