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Quotes About Recursive

Complexity is self-generating. The diversity of our world is understandable because it is possible to design imaginary self-consistent worlds potentially as complex as our own.     This is no mere restatement of common sense. Everyone daydreams alternate worlds, but the imagination soon tires of filling in details. Ulam, Von Neumann, and Conway showed that a few recursive rules can paint in all the details. Creation can be simple.
~ William Poundstone
An ideal map would contain the map of the map, the map of the map of the map.,endlessly. This characteristic was first discovered by Royce. We may call it self-reflexiveness.
~ Alfred Korzybski
The argument against recursive procedures was always an efficiency argument: non-re-entrant code could be executed so much more efficiently. But with the advent of multiprogramming another need for felxible storage allocation has emerged. And if there are still machines in which the use of recursive routines is punished by too heavy a penalty, then I would venture the opinion that the structure of such a machine should now be called somewhat old-fashioned.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
My work was fairly theoretical. It was in recursive function theory. And in particular, hierarchies of functions in terms of computational complexity. I got involved in real computers and programming mainly by being - well, I was interested even as I came to graduate school.
~ Dennis Ritchie
Interestingly, it is the play between imaginary and real numbers that effortlessly produces the beautiful complexity of fractals and chaos theory, models of the recursive shapes and processes we find all around us in nature.
~ John Martineau
We might add here that later on the constructors had an article published in a prominent scientific journal under the title of "Recursive ?—Metafunctions in the Special Case of a Bogus Polypolice Transmogrification Conversion on an Oscillating Harmonic Field of Glass Bells and Green Gig, Kerosene Lamp on the Left to Divert Attention, Solved by Beastly Incarceration-Concatenation
~ Stanis?aw Lem
You can use rm -rf dir to delete a directory and its contents, but be careful! This is one of the few commands that can do serious damage, especially if you run it as the superuser. The -r option specifies recursive delete to repeatedly delete everything inside dir, and -f forces the delete operation.
~ Brian Ward
You can use rm -rf dir to delete a directory and its contents, but be careful! This is one of the few commands that can do serious damage, especially if you run it as the superuser. The -r option specifies recursive delete to repeatedly delete everything inside dir, and -f forces the delete operation. Don't use the -rf flags with globs such as a star (*). And above all, always double-check your command before you run it.
~ Brian Ward
We need to send duplicate ghosts out to each possible router endpoint, wait for an echo, then iterate and repeat. Recursive depth-first traversal.
~ Charles Stross
Turing showed that just as the uncertainties of physics stem from using electrons and photons to measure themselves, the limitations of computers stem from recursive self-reference. Just as quantum theory fell into self-referential loops of uncertainty because it measured atoms and electrons using instruments composed of atoms and electrons, computer logic could not escape self-referential loops as its own logical structures informed its own algorithms.12
~ George Gilder
a table and diagram showing exactly how the algorithm would be fed into the computer, step by step, including two recursive loops. It was a numbered list of coding instructions that included destination registers, operations, and commentary—something that would be familiar to any C++ coder today.
~ Walter Isaacson
each page was ranked by the number and quality of links coming into it, and the quality of these links was determined by the number and quality of links to the pages that originated them, and so on. "It's all recursive," Page explained. "It's all a big circle.
~ Walter Isaacson
Ik ben van plan een verhaal te schrijven, waarin een vent bezig is een verhaal te schrijven. En in het verhaal, dat die tweede vent schrijft is ook een vent bezig een verhaal te schrijven. En in het verhaal weer, dat die vent schrijft, is weer een vent bezig een verhaal te schrijven, en zo tot in het oneindige. En weet je nu wie die vent is, die het verhaal schrijft in het verhaal van de oneindigste vent? ... Ik.
~ Harry Mulisch