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