On Thu, Jul 19, 2007 at 11:44:40AM +0900, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Michael P. Soulier wrote:
> > On 19/07/07 John M. Gamble said:
> > 
> >>> Actually, if Ruby had been implemented in Fortran or Pascal, then most
> >>> certainly arrays would have begun indexing with 1 instead of 0.
> >> Well, if one were to blindly follow one's predecessors, yes - at least
> >> with Fortran.  Pascal lets you determine the array range, so you could
> >> have the option of starting with zero.  And indeed, when we first
> >> encountered that possibility, zero got used a lot.
> > 
> > I believe that Fortran also prevents recursion. Perhaps we should dump that
> > silly feature of Ruby too. ;-)
> > 
> > Mike
> 
> Well ... they *are* talking seriously about dumping Call/CC. How many
> Ruby programmers, or, for that matter, C programmers, actually use
> recursion, even tail recursion? Recursion has been mainstream in
> programming languages since Algol 60, but how many people actually use
> it outside of Lisp/Scheme and other functional languages?

Me, for one.  It's not very common, but . . . once in a while, I do.  Not
in Ruby yet, other than to play around, but in Perl a bit -- when it's
appropriate.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Marvin Minsky: "It's just incredible that a trillion-synapse computer could
actually spend Saturday afternoon watching a football game."