Re: Need help understanding recursion.

Thanks Alphonse!! That is exactly the help I needed and definitely 
helped clear up some things on this program. At first I was not sure as 
to how the tiles were being marked a counted. Now my issue im not to 
sure how the program proceeds to count beyond the adjacent tiles. For 
example:
 #we started with
continent_size(world,5,5) #size=1 here, and now mark this tile as 
'counted tile'

and continue on to
size = size + continent_size(world, x-1, y-1) # 1(size) + (recursion 
call with new parameters  to continent_size(world, 4 (5-1), 4 (5-1)

Now at this point do we run the line of code we just ran with the new 
(world 4,4) parameters and continue to recursively run this till we get 
to the base case? In essence keep continuing counting the tiles that are 
in a down-left direction till we run out of land to count? Or Do we move 
on to the next line of code which would be:

size = size + continent_size(world, x , y-1)

and pass the (world, 4,4) parameters that we got from the first line of 
code, then continuously pass the same parameters all the way down the 
rest of the code in the following lines?

size = size + continent_size(world, x+1, y-1)
size = size + continent_size(world, x-1, y )
size = size + continent_size(world, x+1, y )
size = size + continent_size(world, x-1, y+1)
size = size + continent_size(world, x , y+1)
size = size + continent_size(world, x+1, y+1)

Thanks for the quick replies and all the help.
Tamara and Brandon, Does The Little Schemer apply to Ruby or is it all 
Scheme??

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