On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 7:37 AM, Ronald Reynolds <bump...@bumpker.com> wrote: > I hope I'm not too much of a 'pain in the neck noobie' but what is the short > clean answer about what's going on when we > name a function as part of the definition of itself.. This seems pretty > esoteric to me. What does the system do? >
I am not sure what you mean by esoteric. The simple answer is that you are applying a function to some input. It just happens to be that the function being called is the same function that is being evaluated. The longer answer is that the function is being evaluated in an environment that contains a definition for itself. Thus, it can call itself. Others have suggested pointers into the literature for the finer details of implementation. Hope it helps, Marco -- Cheers, Marco ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
