Newsgroups: comp.lang.dylan,comp.lang.lisp
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From: britt@tigercat.den.mmc.com (Dan Britt)
Subject: Re: Prefix syntax
Message-ID: <1995Mar22.171609.167@den.mmc.com>
Sender: britt@tigercat (Dan Britt)
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Organization: Martin Marietta Astronautics Group
References: <18426.9503201324@subnode.aiai.ed.ac.uk> <neves-2003951134150001@129.105.100.185> <hbaker-2103951221550001@192.0.2.1>
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 1995 17:16:09 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.dylan:3834 comp.lang.lisp:17152

In article <hbaker-2103951221550001@192.0.2.1>, hbaker@netcom.com (Henry Baker) writes:
...
|> Re recursion:  In my experience of teaching undergraduates, recursion is
|> far easier to teach and understand than iteration.  The _only_ people who
|> had any problem with recursion were those who had had their brains damaged
|> (perhaps permanently) due to early exposure to Basic and/or assembly
|> language.

I beg to differ.  Recursion is conceptually much more complex due to the
need to imagine multiple calls to a function INSIDE that function, with
different arguments.  Getting the stopping condition right can be a pain.
(Though in truth I may have some lingering impairment from exposure to
Forth, FORTRAN, IDL, RTPL, C, Pascal, etc. :-))

I do think the syntax of DO is hard to remember, but it's conceptually
simple, and the LOOP macro makes most iteration trivial.  Anyway, that has
been my experience.

Dan
