Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!pioneer!eugene
From: eugene@pioneer.arpa (Eugene N. Miya)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Recursion
Message-ID: <6442@ames.arpa>
Date: 25 Mar 88 04:57:38 GMT
References: <7975@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <533@a.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@ames.arpa
Reply-To: eugene@pioneer.UUCP (Eugene N. Miya)
Distribution: na
Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
Lines: 23

In article <533@a.UUCP> jlg@a.UUCP (Jim Giles) writes:
>The question I asked was: "Why is the keyword RECURSIVE necessary?"

You are right, it's not.

The keyword (not reserved) is "necessary" for those users who believe in
comparing languages solely by counting the number of keywords. (Hence
COBOL with 300-500 reserved words is a "bigger" language.)  I would question
a statement that Giles make in a subsequent posting about better business
languages, or that Fortran is a good scientific language.  COBOL is a
somewhat terrible business language, and only an artifact of Adm. Grace
;-) [Had to say that she wasn't able to make CSC in Atlanta.]  Fortran
has some semblence of algebra, and that's why it is popular.  A recent
story I heard was about a self-taught [lunch-time only] programmer
physicist at Livermore who started all his labels in column 1 and they all
started with "1" and the line printers caught this on his big code which had
one label per line (you know like BASIC ;-).  They came running after him.

From the Rock of Ages Home for Retired Hackers:

--eugene miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@ames-aurora.ARPA
  "You trust the `reply' command with all those different mailers out there?"
  "Send mail, avoid follow-ups.  If enough, I'll summarize."
  {uunet,hplabs,hao,ihnp4,decwrl,allegra,tektronix}!ames!aurora!eugene