On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 04:44:18PM -0800, Mark Schoonover wrote:
Well, I thought I understood recursion until SICP. I think I understand tail recursion too, and essentially it's converting a procedure where the last statement is calling itself into an iterative procedure instead of recursive. My problem is, I don't always see that in the code, but I know it's very important to Lisp. Any recursive procedure, more than likely will get written tail recursively. Pretty much if you don't understand this, Lisp and SICP will be very difficult to understand.
I know for myself, it didn't really start to sink in until I started writing a bunch of code. It was a painful process, but eventually it became kind of second nature. I do now feel learning recursion to this depth was one of the more useful things I learned about programming. Even when programming iteratively, it helps me to reason about the problem. Dave -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
