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> Another standard, time-honored pedagogic device is the dumb joke: “to understand recursion you must understand recursion”, and so on. These confuse recursion
by rileymat2 6y ago
> Another standard, time-honored pedagogic device is the dumb joke: “to understand recursion you must understand recursion”, and so on.
These confuse recursion with cyclicality.
I thought most forms of this joke centered around the definition of recursion, which nicely mimics a definition of a function that references itself. I am not sure what the author is getting at.
- dwenzek 6y agoWith a cyclic definition, one simply fall back precisely to the starting point, while with recursion one applies a similar process process again and again but each time on a smaller scope up to a point the response is known.
- neeeeees 6y agoSo you’re telling me... To understand recursion you should first understand ecursion ? :)