On 8/26/18 5:40 PM, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote: > But their definition is still confusing as it is formulated with a > expression as the argument to a(). > > Taken literally, it says for n+4 to call a() with an argument of 8 (2n) > AND to call it with an argument of 7 (2n-1) (returning two values)
I have seen that sort of notation before for defining sequences (which is what he was doing). Yes, it is not very useful for actually implementing a function to compute the values, but if a was stored in an array it makes some sense, as you make a loop that runs n, and compute the various elements. The one confusion with how it was defined was that the recursive definition starts at n=2, but for that value you only compute the even value, as 2*n-1 = 3 which has already been defined, and that definition would reference a(0) which hasn't been defined. This is one reason I presented what I say as the 'normalized' equations which are what would be more needed to actually compute as a function. -- Richard Damon -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
