Why is recursion so slow?

[Nick Craig-Wood]

Rich Harkins <rharkins at nettrekker.com> wrote:
>  Nick Craig-Wood wrote:
>  [snip]
> > By definition any function in a functional language will
> > always produce the same result if given the same arguments, so you can
> > memoize any function.
> > 
> 
>  Ah, so that's why time.time() seems to be stuck...  ;)

;-)

As Bruno noted I should have said "pure functional language" above.

As for how you deal with IO in a pure functional language, well,
either you make it impure (eg Erlang or Lisp) - functions can have
side effects, or you do other complicated things like monads in
Haskell!

-- 
Nick Craig-Wood <nick at craig-wood.com> -- http://www.craig-wood.com/nick