James A. Ayers

An oft-mentioned advantage of ALGOL over FORTRAN is the recursion capability of the former. FORTRAN adherents often belittle this advantage by claiming that all recursive relations can be reduced to recurrence or iterative relations, or that no recursive relations exist which are worth coding as recursive relations. The question of the truth of this must be left unanswered here. It is hoped that the technique described below will draw the poison from the FORTRANers' wounds by allowing them to recurse to their complete satisfaction. There is an hereditary resemblance between this technique and the MAD (Michigan Algorithm Decoder) recursion technique.