Adventures in R Recursion

Spent the day on the coffee shop patio fielding OLPC questions - from "Wow, that's cool, what is it?" to "Where can i get one?" I demonstratively poured some tea on the keyboard at one point for waterproof emphasis to "coooool"s. Good times. Installed R on the green machine (which is now runing happy-fun-times modified ubuntu. Spent time working out of Venables and Ripley's "S Programming" book - trying to keep some finals week brain momentum going... Plunking example code into the green machine. I kept the screen backlight off, just using sunlight and low battery while the sun was up. When i took a break from coding, i could hit the power button to put it to sleep. So, i worked through some recursion examples, in the meantime discovering my own knowledge-gaps in indexing ( this[-index] is the compliment of this[index] for a numeric index vector, whereas this[!index] is the compliment for a logical index vector) and list packing. Also, found a test example of "=" not the same as "<-" a=1:10 > index1 = a>2 ; any(index2<-(a>2)) ; identical(index1, index2) [1] TRUE [1] TRUE > index1 = a>5 ; any(index2=(a>5)) ; identical(index1, index2) [1] TRUE [1] FALSE ### index2 assignment isn't made... why?! I find recursion confusing; debugging recursive functions is especially so! The fruits of my labor are here, with examples of all of the above... mk.recur = function(a,lim=5, fac=2){ ## takes a numeric vector, returns a list of numeric vectors ## with elements greater than lim, multiplied by fac recursively if(any(index<-a>lim)) {ret=list(a[index])} if(length(a[!index])==0) {return(ret)} ret=append(ret, Recall(fac*a[!index], lim, fac)) return(ret) }