From: "John W. Kennedy" <jwkenne@...>
Date: 2007-07-20T09:49:59+09:00
Subject: Re: The Pebble in the Ruby Shoe

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Michael P. Soulier wrote:
>> On 19/07/07 John M. Gamble said:
>>
>>>> Actually, if Ruby had been implemented in Fortran or Pascal, then most
>>>> certainly arrays would have begun indexing with 1 instead of 0.
>>> Well, if one were to blindly follow one's predecessors, yes - at least
>>> with Fortran.  Pascal lets you determine the array range, so you could
>>> have the option of starting with zero.  And indeed, when we first
>>> encountered that possibility, zero got used a lot.
>> I believe that Fortran also prevents recursion. Perhaps we should dump that
>> silly feature of Ruby too. ;-)
>>
>> Mike
> 
> Well ... they *are* talking seriously about dumping Call/CC. How many
> Ruby programmers, or, for that matter, C programmers, actually use
> recursion, even tail recursion? Recursion has been mainstream in
> programming languages since Algol 60, but how many people actually use
> it outside of Lisp/Scheme and other functional languages?

I used it just the other day in a Ruby solver for 
<URL:http://xkcd.com/c287.html> (I should add that the last time I even 
/thought/ about a packing problem was 1967, so my approach was brute force.)

-- 
John W. Kennedy
Read the remains of Shakespeare's lost play, now annotated!
http://pws.prserv.net/jwkennedy/Double%20Falshood/index.html