The Theory of Classification, Part 3: Object Encoding and Recursion

The benefits and disadvantages of three different object encodings were discussed. The existential encoding based on data abstraction, and which represented an object as an explicit pair of state and methods, avoided recursion but suffered from an ungainly method invocation syntax. The functional encoding was more direct, but used recursion everywhere. The primitive object encoding avoided recursion for self-invocation but needed it elsewhere.