From: "Jonathan Roewen" <jonathan.roewen@gmail.com>
To: "Lucas Holland" <hollandlucas@gmail.com>
Cc: caml-list@inria.fr
Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Factorial function
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 09:12:53 +1300 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <ad8cfe7e0701231212x6234a825h6fd07ae51002d281@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <8C584854-A0BC-4926-A4E7-60620DF4D995@gmail.com>
Recursive call to fact is not in tail position. And by overflow, you
mean stack overflow.
If fact was in tail position, it would loop forever (since there is no
base case).
You can observe that fact is indeed not in tail position be rewriting
the expression without the infix multiplication.
( * ) n (fact (n-1)
or:
let mul x y = x * y => mul n (fact (n-1))
Anyways, questions like these are better addressed to the beginners
list at yahoo groups.
Jonathan
On 1/24/07, Lucas Holland <hollandlucas@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, why does this function:
>
> let rec fact n =
> n * fact (n-1);;
>
> yield an overflow error if called with n = 5?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Lucas
>
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prev parent reply other threads:[~2007-01-23 20:12 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2007-01-23 18:53 Lucas Holland
2007-01-23 18:59 ` [Caml-list] " Steve Taylor
2007-01-23 19:26 ` William D. Neumann
2007-01-23 20:12 ` Jonathan Roewen [this message]
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