Re: JavaSchools (was Re: Colon Operator: Superfluous Syntax?)

["Alex Queiroz" <asandroq@...>]

Hallo,

On 3/15/07, David Haley <dchaley@gmail.com> wrote:
> I can see the case (although I'm not completely convinced) for Java not
> being able to teach pointers, because a lot of the pointerness is hidden
> from you. But, I am baffled as to why he thinks that Java has no
> recursion in it and that one cannot teach recursion in Java. Time and
> time again I've written recursive code in Java. You can even do all
> kinds of interesting recursion in OOP using objects that call each other
> in a hierarchy (or call the same method but on related objects; it's
> still recursion). Can anybody explain why he claims that Java has no
> recursion?

    Of course you can do recursion in Java, as you can in C, but it's
useless. Let's see two factorial functions:

int fact(int n)
{
  if(n == 1) {
     return 1;
  } else {
     return n * fact(n-1);
  }
}

(define (fact n)
  (define (fact-iter n acc)
     (if (= n 1)
         acc
         (fact-iter (- n 1) (* n acc))))
  (fact-iter n 1))

    Now try both with n = 1000000, and see which one blows the stack. :-)

--
-alex
http://www.ventonegro.org/