1. Re: ABS & recursion
jiri babor wrote:
> Hawke, Ralf already pointed out why your fast 'solution' is of no use
> to anyone, but otherwise I really envy you your uncomplicated world,
> populated solely by whole numbers and noodles, sorry, I mean
> one-dimensional strings.
yeah, i saw dat :(
I really need to quit programming on only one pot of coffee...
I miss the wittle t'ings, like... right answers :)
thanks tho... I don't mind being caught, I prefer it actually.
> Prof Wirth, the father of pascal, modula and oberon, once remarked, I
> think it was in an interview some ten, fifteen years ago, that
> recursion was a very powerful concept and he was working on a language
> especially built for and around it. I never heard about the language
> again, but the comments stuck in my mind. At the time I thought what a
> weird and painful way to program, but as I grow older and slower,
> sorry, I mean wiser, it's starting to make sense. I think we will see
> more and more good recursive solutions in Euphoria, simply because of
> the nature of the beast, with an infinitely nestable (?) sequence as
> its main data type. Just idly musing... jiri
quite good musing, actually. Euph is the ideal (most likely)
language for efficient and elegant recursive techniques.
take care of the two *big* problems in recursion, and it
is usually the best approach to problems/solutions that we
take for granted and use standard algorithms with.
problems with recursion:1> overhead with function calls and
2>stack overflows.
you can get around 2 if you do wierd things like having
STACKS=9e1000,256e1000
in config.sys but then you have to make sure all users of
your program have those ridiculously large stacks as well...
nasty.
function call overhead... having to push and pop all those
newly created/destroyed local duplicate variables is simply
a clock-tick eater and there ain't much can be done...
recursion without pushing/popping? then you have something.
and euphoria would really shine then...
kinda makes ya wonder what ol' wirth is up to indeed?
