See, to be honest even though it might feel like a whole of new stuff at once, it's a pretty small language and so we've almost seen all of the syntactic features thus far so now we'll be able to start focusing more on concepts.

瞧，即使它感觉好像一个新的东西,它是一种相当小的语言,我们迄今看到的几乎所有的语法特征,现在我们将把重点放在概念上。

哈佛公开课 - 计算机科学课程节选

And you'll find in the end that recursion is a feature of a language, it allows you to map some very obvious concepts like the phonebook tearing in half and half and half and half to actual code without it using some arbitrary human contrived framework like a for loop or a while loop which are much more stilted mechanisms.

最后你会发现递归是某种语言的一种特征,你可以用它将一些非常明显的思想,比如将电话簿划分为一半又一半,映射为实际代码，而不必使用那些人为框架,像for循环，while循环之类的,那是很呆板的机制。

哈佛公开课 - 计算机科学课程节选