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How recursion got into programming: intrigue, betrayal, and advanced semantics
- Jtsummers 4y agohttps://www.ics.uci.edu/~jajones/INF102-S18/readings/07_dijkstra.pdf https://www.ics.uci.edu/~jajones/INF102-S18/readings/07_dijk... - Also relevant. An early (earliest?) description of a call stack and using it to hold activation records (stack frames as they're commonly called today).
- agumonkey 4y agoWhich lists Bauer of https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-59412-0_3 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-59412-0_...
- eduction 4y agoThe first part of the title is actually “How recursion got into programming”; losing the “How” renders the title incomprehensible. If you’re worried the original title is too clickbaity then drop the part after the colon. But not “how.” The mere fact that recursion got into programming is obvious. The whole point of this article is to explain how.
- krapp 4y agoHN's software automatically edits titles for brevity, which is likely what happened here.
- mtVessel 4y agoAnd almost always renders them less readable, and occasionally unparsable. I do wish they'd turn off this "feature". I've yet to hear a coherent explanation for how this improves the quality of submissions.
- lioeters 4y agoI agree, removing the "How" from an article title is a weird feature that almost always behaves like a bug.
- smadge 4y agoI do love recursion, however is static allocation of activation records sometimes a useful feature (e.g. for safety critical or embedded systems)?
- rurban 4y agoSure. You can prove termination, bounded runtime space, and bounded runtime performance. FORTRAN being the most prominent example