[racket] recursion??

From: Ravi Chemudugunta (chemuduguntar at gmail.com)
Date: Tue Jun 5 17:29:08 EDT 2012

On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 11:37 PM, Ronald Reynolds <bumpker at bumpker.com>wrote:

> I hope I'm not too much of a 'pain in the neck noobie' but what is the
> short clean answer about what's going on when we
> name a function as part of the definition of itself..  This seems pretty
> esoteric to me.  What does the system do?
>
>
If "by name a function as part of the definition of itself" you mean, the
body of a function contains a call to the function that is being defined:

Short answer is, there is nothing special going on - except that define is
a special form but define being a special form does not have anything to do
being able to recursively call functions. I recommend reading up on
metacircular evaluator, (see SICP) - and going through the code by
hand/pen/paper.

-- 
C-x C-s, C-x C-c
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/attachments/20120606/bcae179f/attachment.html>

Posted on the users mailing list.