So, the term test this morning went as well as I possibly could have hoped. I consider this as much a stroke of luck as an effect of diligence, but I'm glad nonetheless. Though I feel comfortable, I don't want to grow complacent, so I am going to revisit A2 over the next week or two and attempt to find a full solution, due dates aside.
To flesh out this entry and in light of the content of the test, here are some general thoughts on recursion:
In short: seriously unintuitive, completely logical, difficult but workable. When recursion was first introduced earlier in the course I had some strange impressions: I found the examples given in lecture to be elegant and straightforward, but trying to apply the concepts in labs and exercises nigh on impossible. I suppose this is partly due to my previous follow-the-answer approach to authoring code - I tended to trace the execution in my head, because I hadn't come across anything complicated enough to make that impossible. After a few attempts at recursive reasoning this gave way to a more abstract view, considering only the actual datum/data a function would return and not how it had been computed. I feel like this change in perspective has seriously helped me as a programmer and will easily carry into new topics.
Cheers until tomorrow!
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