Class 19: Recursion with Natural Numbers (1)

Held: Wednesday, 19 February 2003

Summary: Today we consider recursion over a different domain, that of the natural numbers.

Related Pages:

• EBoard.
• Reading on Numeric Recursion.
• Lab on Numeric Recursion.

Assignments

• Exam 1.

Notes:

• I'll be gone on Friday. Mr. Stone will teach the class. You will continue with the lab on numeric recursion. In case you care, I'll be going to the steering committee meeting of the EdMedia World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia, and Telecommunications.
• Does anyone want to take notes for posting to the EBoard for that class?
• I may make some changes to the wording of problems on the exam by Friday.
• Are there comments on (1) the structure of class; (2) the EBoards; or (3) the Web site? (I may ask again in the weekly checkup.)
• I've finished grading writeup 1. We will go over my my notes on that writeup.
• Happy Birthday Amanda!

Overview:

• Introduction to numeric recursion.
• Lab.

Recursion with Numbers

• While most of the recursion we've been doing has used lists as the structure to recurse over, you can recurse with many different kinds of values.
• It is fairly common to recurse using numbers.
• The natural base cases for integers are when you hit 0 or when you hit 1.
• The natural parameter for recursive procedure calls typically involves subtracting 1 from the argument.

Lab

• Do the lab.