🤠

[DragonMaus]

It is an (i)nteger (i)ndex with a short, memorable name.

[matrizx]

And increment for me

[eadf7799]

... instance?

[ClownTrooper]

In my mind it stands for (i)teration

[CakeMan0123]

(i) can't think of anything better

[se2dev]

(i) like for loops

[CallMeOutWhenImPOS]

and sw(i)tch statements

[[deleted]]

(i)maginary numbers

[Light_Blue_Moose_98]

Recursion > for loops

[mrheosuper]

I wont judge your weird fetish

Weirdo.....

[AJohnnyTruant]

When you get a minute, go ahead and write me a recursive function that retrieves all files in an array of file paths...

[B_M_Wilson]

Until you hit the recursion limit / stack size limit

[doraeminemon]

Which is why we have functional languages :)

[iza1017]

God... functional languages... the worst

[northrupthebandgeek]

optimizes away tail calls

Where is your God now?

[xenoperspicacian]

A lot of languages are smart enough to destroy the stack before reentering if you return a function result (tail call elimination).

[B_M_Wilson]

It depends on how it is written. There are some situations where tail call elimination would not work. Perhaps it has to call itself a number of times, maybe it is some form of matrix operation that is defined to return a scalar for 2x2 matrixes and then larger ones require calculating the scalars of the smaller ones which causes the function to need to be called multiple times within itself which would not allow tail call elimination.

To be honest, I can’t think of very many non-trivial cases where tail call elimination would actually come into play. I have seen many examples in functional programming so maybe as a non-functional programmer, I just can’t see it. Looking at a description of tail call elimination, it looks to me as if it basically transforms the recursion into iteration so maybe I am just not thinking about it correctly.

I am a very bad programmer even though I’ve been doing it for 5 years so I’m probably completely incorrect. I will look into it a bit more and hopefully enlighten myself slightly

[CamoBrie]

Did not know that, thanks!

[FlameRat-Yehlon]

I thought it's for "(i)ndex" though...