ezyang’s blog

the arc of software bends towards understanding

Tracing the compilation of Hello Factorial!

It is often said that the factorial function is the “Hello World!” of the functional programming language world. Indeed, factorial is a singularly useful way of testing the pattern matching and recursive facilities of FP languages: we don’t bother with such “petty” concerns as input-output. In this blog post, we’re going to trace the compilation […]

  • April 13, 2011