Talk:Recursive data type

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This article is based on material taken from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing prior to 1 November 2008 and incorporated under the "relicensing" terms of the GFDL, version 1.3 or later.

The theory part of this article is unfortunately rich in technical notation and jargon without references within Wikipedia or citations of references. It would be a significant task to fill in Wikipedia with appropriate information, but it would be very desirable to refer to external sources.

This subject is outside my real competence, but it looks like John Mitchell's book "Foundations for Programming Languages" would be a reasonable reference for some of the concepts and notation including the μ operator.

Hopefully someone with more competence can help fill out this topic to be more helpful to less knowledgeable readers. Crisperdue (talk) 19:09, 19 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Merge[edit]

I propose merging with Inductive type. I've started a discussion on that talk page. siddharthist (talk) 00:20, 18 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

There are differences. The article Inductive type correctly emphasizes on structural recursion. While here, we have directed graphs as data, the graph of inductive types' data is restricted to terminating relations, i.e. acyclic and without infinite chains. -- Cobalt pen (talk) 09:45, 19 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The main difference between inductive and recursive data types is the latter admit contravariance in their definition. This is unfortunately not discussed at all. 128.237.82.2 (talk) 00:57, 21 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]