On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 1:57 PM, Andrew Coppin
If you think that sounds silly, ask some random person (not a computer programmer, just some random human) how find the sum of a list of numbers. I can practically guarantee that most humans will reply "do X, then do Y, and then do Z". Almost nobody will reply with "the sum of an empty list is defined as zero, and the sum of a non-empty list is defined as the addition of the first element and the sum of the remaining elements". To a normal human, that almost sounds like a riddle rather than an explanation.
I don't think it's unusual for a "random person" to give a recursive answer. It's just that a "normal human" tends to avoid anything that isn't tail recursion. For example, I can easily imagine someone saying "to sum a list, add the current element to the running total, and now carry on summing from the next element". I doubt most people would consider that to be a riddle. The problem is that humans don't have deep stacks, so they find it harder to talk in terms of methods that require deep stacks. -- Dan