I’m confused by a part of Chapter 9 of the Little Schemer.
I’m fine so far – this is just context.
The Seventh Commandment:
So they are using number of atoms as the yardstick to judge whether the new argument to align is smaller and thus a reasonable recursive case.
Basically we don’t know if align will loop infinitely for some arguments.
This is where I start to get confused.
What do they mean by simpler?
I’m not sure what their answer means.
Since I don’t understand their previous answer, I’m not following their reasoning in this part either.
I’m not sure why it’d be twice as much.
I can follow the procedure, but I don’t understand the purpose of it.
After seeing their answer to the first example and reasoning my way through the procedure, I was able to answer the second question on my own successfully.
If I understood their criterion for simplicity, I think this part would make sense.