Fibonacci series recursion error

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 11:14 PM, Hans Georg Schaathun <hg at schaathun.net> wrote:
> That's the silliest argument I ever heard.  The programmer should write
> the code the way he and application domain experts think, i.e. very
> often recursively.  The compiler should generate code the way the CPU
> thinks (most optimally), i.e. iteratively.

The CPU can function iteratively or recursively. The main difference
between the programmer and the CPU there is that the CPU is always
imperative, while a programmer might want to think functionally, or in
an event-driven model, and then "under the covers" the compiler
translates that into imperative code.

But in my opinion, the programmer and the interpreter/compiler are
teammates. If you allow programmers to be stupid, you will get a lot
of stupid programmers writing code. (I think that's one of PHP's
biggest downsides.) If the human and the machine know each other well
enough, the resulting code can be orders of magnitude more efficient
to run, *without taking any more tme to code* because the programmer
already knew the right things to do.

Perhaps it will take you four hours to read through something, study
it, maybe eyeball the compiler's source code, maybe do some
disassembly. If you have a few years of career ahead of you, you'll
benefit many times over from those few hours, and without spending
extra time, you'll produce better code. THAT is what distinguishes the
master from the novice.

Chris Angelico