Recursion and Lisp
I had Daniel Friedman (author of the Little Lisper) as a first year CS instructor in college. The class was supposed to be an introduction to FORTRAN (that dates me!). But when I went to class, Prof. Friedman kept writing code on the board that had way too many parenthesis for FORTRAN. I spent about three days in class absolutely confused and lost. Around the third day understanding dawned and recursion (and LISP) started making a lot of sense.
Its a powerfull tool to have on your workbench. If you ever come across a copy of the Little Lisper (or Little Schemer), its a fairly gentle way to become comfortable with recursion (and a lot of other ideas). The books are written in a style that's not too different from the way Friedman teaches.
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-- Jim Weirich jweirich@one.net [link|http://onestepback.org|http://onestepback.org]
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"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct,
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)