Re-running
I'd wondered before why "recursion," a thing defined in terms of its lesser selves, is the word that it is.
I learned today from this NY Times article about handwriting that the root of "cursive" is the Latin currere, "to run."
Recursion, then, is just running again.
Comments
Hi Ezra,
actually RE-CURRERE/RE-CURRENS in latin means: "to return" or "to have recurse" or "happening again and again".
So i guess recursive comes out from this, because a recursive function goes back again and again to its definition in order to be evaluated
Posted by: Matteo Mio | September 14, 2009 3:36 PM