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reentry and recusrion

summary

    This subchapter looks at renetry and recursion.

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stub section

    This subchapter is a stub section. It will be filled in with instructional material later. For now it serves the purpose of a place holder for the order of instruction.

    Professors are invited to give feedback on both the proposed contents and the propsed order of this text book. Send commentary to Milo, PO Box 1361, Tustin, California, 92781, USA.

reentry and recursion

    This subchapter looks at reentry and recursion.

YACC

    YACC (Yet Another Compiler Compiler) is an early tool from UNIX used to generate parsers for “little languages”.

    Brian Kernighan said:

    Certainly for language development, yacc was an enormous influence. Speaking personally, I would never gotten off the ground doing language work without it, because for whatever reason, I wasn’t any good at writing recursive descent parsers. I always had trouble with precedence and associativity.
    With yacc you didn’t have to think about that. You could write down a grammar that made sense, and then you could say “This is the precedence and the associativity, and here’s how you handle ugly cases like unary operators that are spelled the same as binary operators.” All of those things were so much easier. Just the existence of that tool made it possible to think about doing things from a language point of view that otherwise would have been too hard.

man vs. boy

    In July 1964 Donald Knuth published a test to determine how well a particular compiler handled recursion and non-local references in ALGOL-60.

    His stated goal: “There are quite a few ALGOL60 translators in existence which have been designed to handle recursion and non-local references properly, and I thought perhaps a little test-program may be of value. Hence I have written the following simple routine, which may separate the “man-compilers” from the “boy-compilers”.”

    Knuth’s test program:

    begin
      real procedure A (k, x1, x2, x3, x4, x5);
      value k; integer k;
      begin
        real procedure B;
        begin k:= k - 1;
            B:= A := A(k, B, x1, x2, x3, x4);
        end;
        if k <= 0 then A:= x4 + x5 else B;
      end;
      outreal (A (10, 1, -1, 01, 1, 0));
    end;

    This program creates a tree of B call frames that refer to each other and the A call frames, each with its own copy of k that is changed every time the associated B is called. Knuth wrote in his original paper that the answer was -121. The correct answer is -67.

    The three difficult features tested are nested function definitions, function references, and constant/function dualism. An inadequate compiler may become confused and access the wrong call frames.

other

   “12. Recursion is the root of computation since it trades description for time.” —Alan Perlis, Epigrams on Programming, ACM’s SIGPLAN Notices Volume 17, No. 9, September 1982, pages 7-13

chapter contents

• eight queens

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