<story><title>How recursion got into Algol 60: a comedy of errors</title><url>https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/how-recursion-got-into-programming-a-comedy-of-errors-3/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dragonwriter</author><text>Shouldn&amp;#x27;t this be &amp;quot;how recursion got into Algol 60&amp;quot;? After all, part of the background is that McCarthy wanted it in Algol, &lt;i&gt;coming off his success with Lisp&lt;/i&gt;, that had, in its earliest form, &lt;i&gt;only&lt;/i&gt; recursion and no iteration. So recursion had already &amp;quot;got into programming&amp;quot; when this story of &amp;quot;How recursion got into programming&amp;quot; kicks off.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sytelus</author><text>One can argue that many features of programming languages have existed in theory since days of Euclid and Archimedes. This article argues that ALGOL was the first attempt to &amp;quot;standardized&amp;quot; features of a programming language that was expected to be in wide spread usage. It was designed by committee of big name experts and the &amp;quot;comedy&amp;quot; part is that lot of these people considered recursion as unnecessary or even harmful. No one knows what would have happened if ALGOL indeed didn&amp;#x27;t supported recursion, became widespread and was considered as gold standard. How many years before someone would have broken the barrier and said experts were wrong and recursion is one of the most important part of language?</text></comment>
<story><title>How recursion got into Algol 60: a comedy of errors</title><url>https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/how-recursion-got-into-programming-a-comedy-of-errors-3/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dragonwriter</author><text>Shouldn&amp;#x27;t this be &amp;quot;how recursion got into Algol 60&amp;quot;? After all, part of the background is that McCarthy wanted it in Algol, &lt;i&gt;coming off his success with Lisp&lt;/i&gt;, that had, in its earliest form, &lt;i&gt;only&lt;/i&gt; recursion and no iteration. So recursion had already &amp;quot;got into programming&amp;quot; when this story of &amp;quot;How recursion got into programming&amp;quot; kicks off.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mordocai</author><text>Did the post get updated after you left this comment? The post I read talks about lisp.</text></comment>