In education teachers strive to demystify tough concepts by coming up with succinct and minimalistic examples and case studies. Frequently, despite investing great effort, the underlying mechanisms remain surrounded by mystic clouds just because the substrate over which things are exposed is at an overly high abstraction level. This is the case with recursion when illustrated via mainstream programming languages. In this blog, I would like to share a different approach of explaining processes under the hood using a low conceptual programming layer, namely machine language. It is remarkable how students easily comprehend recursion at this level without being dragged into thinking what is really going on in the background in programs written in Java, C#, Python, or any other modern programming language. Problem Description For teachers the booksite accompanying the book Computer Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne is an excellent source of educati...
This blog contains posts mostly from the domains of computer science and systems/software engineering. Each post is written in a self-contained manner with links toward external sources. These should be treated as mandatory reading, as they explain concepts not repeated in posts. Every topic is treated in pragmatic fashion using concrete examples implemented in various mainstream programming languages (like, C++, Python and Java).