From: utzoo!decvax!microsof!uw-beave!cornell!vax135!ariel!orion!lime!houti!hogpc!houxz!ihnp4!iwlc7!dfz
Newsgroups: net.lang
Title: Re: Difficulty of recursion
Article-I.D.: iwlc7.146
Posted: Tue Mar 22 09:09:07 1983
Received: Thu Mar 24 20:13:44 1983
Reply-To: dfz@iwlc7.UUCP (David F. Ziffer)
References: ihuxr.366

Your "cheese stands alone" argument is amusing but misleading.  What you
have demonstrated is the difficulty of understanding explicit use of a
stack.  While it is true that recursion is often implemented using stacks,
it is not necessary for the user of recursion to have any knowledge of
such implementation.

I believe you will find that the languages of the future will rely heavily
on recursion rather than iterive constructs, for several reasons:

	1. recursion is more concise

	2. recursive algorithms tend to make the structure of
	   the problem obvious; iterative algorithms tend to hide it

	3. recursion automatically breaks up a problem into a hierarchy
	   of independently executable modules;  such modules can
	   therefore be executed in parrallel on a machine of suitable
	   architecture (none exists yet); iterative techniques offer
	   little hope for parallelism; parallelism will open for us
	   a new dimension of performance

				Dave Ziffer
				..!decvax!ihnss!iwlc7!dfz