"Oz" wrote in message
...
Gordon Couger writes

Oz:
yes, but you has the x-y data so calculating the area is a simple
simpson's rule. NO recursion.

As I recall she ask for help and I looked at what she had and solved the
problem with out thinking much about it. I saw triangles and rectangles
and
summed them up. I used recursion because I was in the middle of a
hydrology
problem that I was solving recursively and it was the method that came to
mind. This was something we did one afternoon after coffee. She had a
problem and I made it go away.

Sounds like maths education is a problem in the states, too.

Turning math into a computer algorithm is not always straight forward. It
wasn't a math problem it was a computer programming problem,

Gordon