Linked by Takuya Murata on Tue 18th May 2004 06:26 UTC
My physics teacher likes to say that physics like to make problems they face look like ones that they know how to solve. A simple harmonic oscillation was one he frequently used in class, as is presumably the case in physics in general.
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``recursive function is really, really bad, especially on an unbounded list''
That is, unless you use a system which is properly tail-recursive, like Scheme and many implementations of Common LISP. Instead of pushing a new stack frame for every function call, they reuse existing space for tail-calls (that is, calls whose return values determine the return value of the encapsulating function). This allows typical recursive constructs to execute in finite space - just like iteration, except that recursion feels more elegant to many, and it's easier to make correctness proofs about it.