Comments by "xybersurfer" (@xybersurfer) on "What on Earth is Recursion? - Computerphile" video.

  1. i think the professor picked an excellent example, but the explanation could have been better. he didn't have to mention the stack. he could have focussed on substituting the initial call into the resulting return statements.
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  2. 1. he might have made 1 the base case not to confuse people 2. i strongly agree with this point. there was too much focus on the stack. in my opinion he should have left the stack out completely. 3. good point for imperative languages but in functional languages it's the only way 4. he should have used indentation better, but checks would clutter the essence of the examples. (usually you shouldn't be checking for overflows at runtime) 0. what i personally would have liked to see is that he explained the example by rewriting the original function call and every time on a new line, transforming it to the resulting return statement (as is usually taught in functional programming) it's nice to see there are other people that have a critical view, and don't just praise whatever is shown.
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