TITLE: Recursing into the Weekend
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: February 02, 2007  6:13 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
Between meetings today, I was able to sneak in some reading.
A number of science bloggers have begun to write a series
of "basic concepts" entries, and one of the math bloggers
wrote a piece on the basics of
<A HREF="http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2007/01/basics_recursion_and_induction_1.php">
   recursion and induction</A>.
This is, of course, a topic well on my mind this semester
as I teach functional programming in my Programming
Languages course.  Indeed, I just gave my first lecture on
data-driven recursion in class last Thursday, after having
given an introduction to induction on Tuesday.  I don't spend
a lot of time on the mathematical sort of recursion in this
course because it's not all that relevant to to the processing
of computer programs.  (Besides, it's not nearly as fun!)

This would would probably make a great "basic concepts in
CS" post sometime, but I don't have time to write it today.
But if you are interested, you can browse my
<A HREF="http://cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/teaching/154/sessions/session08.html">
   lecture notes</A>
from the first day of recursive programming techniques in
class.

(And, yes, Schemers among you, I know that my placement of
parentheses in some of my procedures is non-standard.  I do
that in this first session or so so that students can see the
<TT>if</TT>-expression that mimics our data type stand out.
I promise not to warp their Scheme style with this convention
much longer.)
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