Pascal and Recursion

Abstract

When the new programming language Pascal was developed in the 1970's, Walter Gander did not like it because because many features which he appreciated in prior programming languages were missing in Pascal. For example the block structure was gone, there were no dynamical arrays, no functions or procedures were allowed as parameters of a procedure, no external code procedures, no automatic conversions from integers to reals, no goto-statements, etc. This made the translation of programs difficult. However as Pascal was further developed, he found Pascal easier to manage. In this paper, he shows the impact of Pascal on numerical software. Using recursion, a new and elegant algorithm for quadrature could be developed