CSC148 February 29th 2015 Writing Recursion

In this post, I will be writing about object-oriented programming as well as writing recursion, to make up for the blog post that i forgot to write during reading week.

Object-oriented programming is a term that i first heard of near the end of CSC108, as we began learning about writing our own classes.  At that time, my understanding of OOP is simply what my professor had taught me, a way of programming that focuses on objects.  I learned after doing some research that OOP is focused on objects rather than actions, and data rather than logic.  In this model, objects are well defined data structures that can be manipulated through methods, and objects can also interact with each other through methods.  Programs that are built on OOP are essentially objects that interact with one another though logical functions.  Python is a common type of OOP language, as are C++ and Java.

In Python, objects are defined by their class, which may be inherited from another class.  These classes may be modified versions of generic data structures such as lists, and in turn they may be modified into objects such as queues and stacks.  Classes not only represent objects through different data structures and attributes, but also include ways of how these objects can be manipulated.  For example, a class that represents a circle may have methods that adjusts the radius of the circle, as well as tell whether or not two circle objects are the same.  Classes can even represent complex objects such as chess, and different chess strategies.  With creativity, i believe a great deal of both real and abstract objects can be defined by Python classes.

Now onto recursive functions.  The focus of the last two weeks of 148 was the writing of recursive functions.  As i have mentioned in a previous post, the process of writing recursive function is really similar to induction to me.  First i have to find a base case, which in most recursive functions is the basic output on a simple object.  Then, the recursion will repeat a certain process over and over until it reaches the base cases, and then it will perform a boolean function on the base cases.  However, in the last lab, i practiced writing more complicated recursive functions that involved if statements.  Though i was able to figure out how to implement the 4 practice functions, i feel like i still havent grasped the intuition of recursion yet.