On Mon, 2010-09-13 at 17:03 -0400, Raul Miller wrote: > But I am not at all sure that teaching about > recursion has more value than teaching about mechanisms > like ^:
I suppose that recursion provides a natural, intuitive mechanism whereby concepts like "repeated application of a function" can be formulated in a generic way. It seems to me that J just cuts the "middleman" by providing the concept straight away. Of course recursion can also be employed to build all sorts of other concepts, e.g. accumulators "/", filters "#", etc, whereas J offers them out of the box. It could be argued that the value of recursion is that it allows one to reason about and implement such concepts in an universally consistent manner, whereas J offers more of a practical "power tool kit", without necessarily showing the underlying links (e.g. between ^:_ and # and /). Guess they remain the implemntor's secrets ;) My $0.20, anyway... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
