Recursiveness

Recursiveness is the quality of being defined in terms which include the whole. For example, in symbolic logic a well-formed formula (WFF) can be either:

1. a predicate
2. the negation of a WFF
3. the combination of two WFF's with a binary operator

The LISP programming language uses a recursive data structure.

A fascination with recursive definitions in the software development community led to the invention of several recursive acronyms:

• PHP (originally Personal Home Page) => PHP Hypertext Pre-processor
• GNU => GNU's Not Unix

See also

• Fractal