On 31 Aug 2006, at 02:33, Dana Hudes wrote:
I wish to also point out that no Perl book replaces a solid grounding in computer science. Tail-end recursion removal is certainly a technique covered in the CS literature quite extensively. Any undergraduate book on algorithms covers it. Sophisticated techniques and new approaches may well be in journal articles; I personally haven't done a search of the ACM and IEEE CS literature for this topic. If pushed I can pull down 3 different textbooks on the subject of algorithms and see what they have to say. Remember, MJD and Damian mostly don't invent new techniques. Rather, they adapt them to the particular strengths of Perl.
Yes quite - that's all well and good. But this is not even vaguely new territory is it? Dealing with tail recursion and deep recursion by rewriting a function to use an explicitly managed stack or a queue - or by turning the tail call into a goto or whatever is just well established practice, no?
I don't have anything against discussion (obviously...) but do we need to discuss something that's already so well understood?
-- Andy Armstrong, hexten.net
