lew (03/25/83)
I sort of painted myself into a corner trying to defend my recursive "cheese stands alone" formulation. I put myself in the position of calling "a+b+c+d" recursive, since it can be recognized by a recursive syntactical rule. I do think that my example has a point to it, but I don't want to defend it as a universal paradigm of iteration vs. recursion. This all reminds me of Piaget's distinction between concrete and abstract thinking. A student may be able to recognize valid arithmetic expressions without being able to formulate how he or she does so. The student may actually be recursively applying a rule without in any sense understanding the principle of recursion. Conversely, the difficulty of mentally parsing my "cheese" example which was formulated as a deeply nested noun clause, says nothing about the difficulty of understanding the principle by which it is generated. I think this was the point of those who criticized my example. Lew Mammel, Jr. ihuxr!lew