...would be a fascinating experience.

They're scoring students on their ability to interpret the code correctly, which has nothing to do with whether recursion is the right approach. This is the sort of thing people will see in job interviews: code that you'll never actually see in the real world, with the question what does this do?

It's an exercise in determining the behavior of the function, not instruction for the right way to achieve what the function does. In the real world, you have to be able to follow sub-optimal code and know what it does. Anybody with the skills to follow this function will know one or more better ways to achieve the same result.

just get Angry Birds.

> It is spelled *expresso* not *espresso*. I am from Italy. I would know.

The letter X isn't used in Italian. Seems like the kind of thing you would know.

> In comparison, on the VIC-20 keywords were stored literally, but you could abbreviate them, e.g. ? for PRINT or pO for POKE.

No, VIC-20 (and C64, PET, etc.) keywords were tokenized. That is, "POKE" took a single byte rather than four.

see a Beowulf Cluster of these things.

I would agree that medical use trumps party use; but how difficult would it be to retool an MRI to use, say, liquid nitrogen for cooling?

Sigh. Shouldn't this be, "I would agree that medical use trumps party use; so how difficult would it be to decorate with something else?" One thing is orders of magnitude easier than the other, and I'm sure you can figure out which is which.

We should redesign medical equipment and phase out existing medical equipment because we don't want to explain the lack of helium balloons to children? I think your priorities are a little out of whack.

How about we use the helium for the MRIs, and teach children not to expect floating balloons. Balloon animals are a good alternative, if balloons need to be involved at all. I've got four young kids, and they're pretty easy to please.

...for those of us with evil twins.

> Tell your past self to start betting people . . . that the World Trade Center will get totally knocked down by a terrorist attack no later than 2002

You'd find your past self with a lot of 'splaining to do down in Guantanamo when you collect.

> Where in the hell can you find (good) beer for $1?

Czech Republic.

First, using the same data structures is fairly easy across multiple languages because the same object-oriented principles usually apply. Second, if you use web services to be consumed across your platforms, you don't need to duplicate business logic in more than one language (you can at least minimize it). Third, you're mentioning three mobile platforms that pretty much require an OO approach in their respective languages (C#, Java, and Objective-C), so why would you throw out the entire approach for the web?

Sure, but all that stuff can be forged. Of course, it would be ridiculous to forge that stuff, wouldn't it? In fact, it seems (to me) almost as ridiculous to falsely claim that one's sister has been sued as it would be to actively falsify evidence. Sure, I wouldn't put any money on that claim being true, but somebody getting stressed out about it to this extent seems kind of sad.

No evidence, nothing.

What evidence would you deem sufficient for claiming that one's sister had been sued by the RIAA?