It Is What It Is (And Nothing Else) – Why Recursion Still Matters

Re:It Is What It Is (And Nothing Else) – Why Recursion Still... by pjmlp on Monday February 22, 2016 @07:21AM (#11150308)

> For example, they always terminate.

How do you terminate?

   for(;;) {
   }

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Re:It Is What It Is (And Nothing Else) – Why Recursion Still... by meggar on Monday February 22, 2016 @08:38AM (#11150667)

break;

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Re:It Is What It Is (And Nothing Else) – Why Recursion Still... by pjmlp on Monday February 22, 2016 @08:45AM (#11150712)

Not all programming languages have break; C syntax was just an example.

Also break is no different from using return (to keep C syntax as example) when recursing.

If you guard break with if then you also need to prove if the "if" condition does indeed provide a dataflow path to break.

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Re:It Is What It Is (And Nothing Else) – Why Recursion Still... by AnimalMuppet on Monday February 22, 2016 @01:41PM (#11153179)

> If you guard break with if then you also need to prove if the "if" condition does indeed provide a dataflow path to break.

In all cases, for all possible inputs.

On the other hand, if that's what your for loop looks like, you probably have the same problem of proving that your recursion terminates (in all cases, for all possible inputs).

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Re:It Is What It Is (And Nothing Else) – Why Recursion Still... by pjmlp on Monday February 22, 2016 @02:04PM (#11153373)

Of course, I was just arguing against the OP that all loops terminate.

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