Towards Making Theory of Computation Course More Understandable and Relevant: Recursive Functions, For-Loops, and While-Loops

Authors

Vladik Kreinovich, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Olga Kosheleva, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow

Publication Date

10-2015

Comments

Technical Report: UTEP-CS-15-78

Published in Proceedings of the 5th International Conference "Mathematics Education: Theory and Practice" MATHEDU'2015, Kazan, Russia, November 27-28, 2015, pp. 17-19.

Abstract

In this paper, we show how we can make a theory of computation course more understandable and more relevant: namely, we show that a seemingly abstract notion of primitive recursion is a direct counterpart to for-loops, while the mu-recursion is an analog of while-loops.