Re: [math-fun] Subset-lex: did we miss an order?

On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 10:37 AM, Fred Lunnon <fred.lunnon@gmail.com> wrote:

Secondly, recursion -- hoary standby of so many programming courses -- and looplessness seem mutually incompatible. Converting one type of algorithm into the other is a process which somehow should be mechanical, but in practice always proves next to impossible in nontrivial situations.

Do you have any evidence for this assertion? Scheme compilers seem to work, and they are required by the language spec to convert certain sorts of recursive programs to iterative ones. I program professionally in Lisp, currently using the Lispworks compiler, and it successfully transforms recursive procedures to iterative ones. Andy