> “How can you sum the numbers from 1 to 10 without using a loop?” ... And there it was: recursion. Wait, is there something I don’t actually understand about recursion? When a recursive function calls itself, is that not a loop?
It depends on how technical you want to get. It's certainly not a loop in the classic sense, like a for loop etc. Like there are no `continue` or `break` semantics and you can't return out of it (and yes yes of course you can still do all that stuff, just not with dedicated keywords). I call it a loop, though. Whenever I make a lil' server in Elixir (mostly always for teaching) I always call the function `loop`:
defmodule Server do
def start_link do
spawn_link(&loop/0)
end
defp loop do
receive do
msg ->
IO.puts(msg)
loop()
end
end
end