How recursion got into programming: intrigue, betrayal, and advanced semantics

vanemden.wordpress.com

32 points·ahupp··8 comments

https://www.ics.uci.edu/~jajones/INF102-S18/readings/07_dijk... - Also relevant. An early (earliest?) description of a call stack and using it to hold activation records (stack frames as they're commonly called today).

Which lists Bauer of https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-59412-0_...

I do love recursion, however is static allocation of activation records sometimes a useful feature (e.g. for safety critical or embedded systems)?

Sure. You can prove termination, bounded runtime space, and bounded runtime performance.

FORTRAN being the most prominent example

The first part of the title is actually “How recursion got into programming”; losing the “How” renders the title incomprehensible.

If you’re worried the original title is too clickbaity then drop the part after the colon. But not “how.” The mere fact that recursion got into programming is obvious. The whole point of this article is to explain how.

HN's software automatically edits titles for brevity, which is likely what happened here.

And almost always renders them less readable, and occasionally unparsable. I do wish they'd turn off this "feature". I've yet to hear a coherent explanation for how this improves the quality of submissions.

I agree, removing the "How" from an article title is a weird feature that almost always behaves like a bug.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com