Re: [stack] disallowing recursive definitions
John Cowan <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.lang.concatenative |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Joe Bowbeer scripsit: > As far as I know, Dijkstra didn't have a beef with recursion. It seems to me from _A Discipline of Programming_ that he thought recursion a special case, relatively unimportant: the programming language he introduces there does not admit it. And he is very much on record as condemning the reduction of iteration to (tail) recursion as a false reduction, _ignotum per ignotius_. > Recursion is the simple, elegant solution. Recursion can be employed elegantly, when it mirrors induction, or inelegantly, when it is an invitation to make a mess of your program. Not all syntactic sugar is oncogenetic: there are good reasons to use both let and lambda instead of just lambda. -- As you read this, I don't want you to feel John Cowan sorry for me, because, I believe everyone [email protected] will die someday. http://www.ccil.org/~cowan --From a Nigerian-type scam spam