Austin Ziegler wrote:
-snip-
> Never *once* have I needed to implement an Ackermann function. Not
> once. In my entire career. I look at the crap that is on alioth and
> there's very little that represents common use. There's some neat
> things -- the new DNA transformation ones -- but exactly how many
> people will actually be using that in their work?

Never once needed to implement a recursive function?

Some details are always specific to a problem domain and application,
but the same representations and approaches are used across problem
domains and across applications - yes the details are from DNA sequence
analysis, but the programs process ascii strings and hashtables.