Language for the ages

It was thus said that the Great John R. Hogerhuis once stated: I used to think that recursion was useless, due to the examples given in school, like multiplication, the Fibonacci sequence or the Towers of Hanoi, but in the past few years, I've found a few places (only a few) where it does lead to a clean implementation, usually dealing with tree-structured data, like a file system: process(dir) { foreach entry in (dir) { if (entry isa file) then munge(entry) else if (entry isa directory) process(entry) } } But with that exception, I rarely use recursion. Also, modern languages tend to convert tail-recursion into loops. For instanace, in Erlang [1]: fib(N) -> fibitr(1,0,N). fibitr(_,B,0) -> B; fibitr(A,B,Count) -> fibitr(A + B,A,Count - 1). The Erland compiler can convert the recursive function fibitr/3 [2] into a version that loops. The naive version: fib(0) -> 0; fib(1) -> 1; fib(N) -> fib(N-1) + fib(N-2). Is *MUCH* slower, since it isn't tail recursive. -spc (Erlang *might* be on topic ... ) [1] A Language developed by Ericcson to run their phone switches. It's an interesting language [2] the fibitr function that takes three parameters. And in Erland, variables don't have types, values do. [3] [3] Ick. But hey, it's what all the modern lanaguages are doing nowadays.