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On 7/18/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb / cesmail.net> 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?


You've never written code to traverse some kind of tree? And if you have,
you did it all iteratively? I would suggest _lots_ of programmers use
recursion, even in C.

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