On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 1:17 PM, Luke -Jr [email protected] wrote:
On Thursday 04 September 2008 07:50:24 Justin Dugger wrote:
Apparently the Google benchmarks are heavy on recursion, which is a complicated concept and the bane of most programmers.
How exactly is recursion in the slightest bit complicated?
Spoken like someone who's never had to explain it to a novice programmer, or implement it in a compiler. A number of people do find it complicated in practice and avoid it like the plague. I know plenty of people who hate Lisp and Ocaml because one is almost forced to use recursion.
And if that doesn't satisfy you, recursion is complicated because you don't know when the compiler effectively implements tail call recursion without reading the code or analyzing memory usage.
Justin Dugger