"Cousin Stanley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] | > In scheme, I believe you just have recursion.
I was referring to the original mimimalist core language developed by Guy and Sussman and as I remember it being used in the original edition of SICP (see Wikipedia). I also remember statements explaining (truthfully) that builtin iteration is not needed because it can be defined in terms of tail recursion, which in Scheme is required to be optimized to be just as space efficient. I see in Wikipedia that Scheme has do loops (all versions?), but I do not know if that was original or added. If the former, it was de-emphasized. Hence my belief, even if mistaken. | Cousin TJR .... | | I'm a total scheme rookie starting only about 3 days ago | and one of the mechanisms I went looking for was a technique | for iteration .... | | Found in the scheme docs about iteration supplied | via the reduce package .... Right. An add-on library package, not part of the core;-) In Python, modules can add functions (and classes, etc), but not statement syntax, so adding while statements defined in terms of recursion is not possible. Scheme is quite elegant and worth learning at least the basics of. My only point was that Sussman is an odd person to be criticizing (somewhat mistakingly) Python for being minimalist. tjr -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
