BASIC vs Python

[Richards Noah (IFR LIT MET)]

"Christos TZOTZIOY Georgiou" <tzot at sil-tec.gr> wrote in message
news:ff95s0ttv8vp6clii0usldh7coecvethvk at 4ax.com...
> On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 01:43:56 -0600, rumours say that Mike Meyer
> <mwm at mired.org> might have written:
>
> >Assembler was better - at least you had recursion with
> >assembler.
>
> You had recursion with BASIC --what you probably mean is that you had no
> stacked parameters (unless you imitated that with using an indexed
> array).
>
> 90 rem recursion
> 100 print "beautiful colours"
> 110 gosub 100

I think he means that you had no recursive function calls in BASIC.  I
suppose, to most of us, "recursion" doesn't mean "doing things more than
once," since by that definition, iteration is also recursion.  Recursion
generally means some type of self reference, like in functional languages,
where the simplest recursion is base case/recurring step.  BASIC didn't do
this, without a bit of unsightly hackery.  Then again, I don't believe that
it was really a concern at the time, so I don't suppose its too important of
an issue :)