Re: Interesting article by Joel Spolsky: The Perils of JavaSchools

On Tue, 10 Jan 2006 13:42:07 -0500 (EST), "Arthur J. O'Dwyer"
<ajo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


> Here I agree with Gerry. The whole "tail recursion" thing is a complete
>and utter red herring in the JavaSchools debate. I didn't know Java had
>partial support for TRE, and I still don't care. I don't even care that
>Lisp supports TRE. That's an implementation detail, and it doesn't affect
>the way students /think/ about programming.

Here I will disagree even though there is much in what you say. The
catch is that if you adopt a style in which every thing is recursive
software becomes grossly inefficient unless (a) you have tail
recursion optimization, and (b) you program in such a way as to
exploit tail recursion. In imperative languages this generally isn't
an issue because explicit iteration is used rather than tail
recursion. In consequence the lack of TRO isn't important.


Richard Harter, cri@xxxxxxxx
http://home.tiac.net/~cri, http://www.varinoma.com
The eternal revolution has its needs - its slogans to be chanted,
its demonstrations to be held, its children to eat.
.

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