Comment Re:Freak your colleagues out with "no loop" code.. (Score 1) 382
I remember once years ago freaking my colleagues out with a largish app written in R... with nary a loop anywhere.
That's a feature of functional languages, a class that also includes Scheme and XSLT. The basic idea is that programs should not have state, because state makes them harder to debug. A for or while loop, by definition, has state, so you have to do your iteration some other way, namely Tail Recursion.
I suppose that makes sense, but I've never been able to teach myself to think that way. It's the main reason I never managed to get through The Wizard Book.
R has a scheme-like lower layer but it feels more like APL with its array manipulation capabilities than Scheme. It does not support tail recursion.
