>>>FWIW, when I search dictionary.com for "recurse," the only dictionary that turns it up is the Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing. All the standard dictionaries do not include the word, so I conclude that it's programmer's jargon and not good English.
>>>
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>>I sympathize with your feelings about it, Tamar. For me the words "synergy" and "proactive" have not been easy to swallow, and you'll never catch me "persisting a variable", yet I am unapologetic about recursing to my heart's content. At least there is no confusion about the meaning of "recurse", and I would not favor substituting "recur" on the basis of grammatical correctness.
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>>Formal acceptance by linguistic "authorities" is an acknowledgement, after the fact, of accepted usage. Language happens. Not every new term deserves to be recognized and accepted simply because it is popular, but in this particular case I consider it reasonable and justified. If it's any consolation, Google shows more than 800 thousand hits for "recurse".
>
>I don't think Google hits is a good way to judge whether something is right. To pick an example that I noticed in another forum this week, I googled "for all intensive purposes," which is a corruption of "for all intents and purposes" and found over 75,000 hits. I'm sure a fair number of them are listings correcting the mistake, but even so, that's a lot of hits. Does this mean "for all intensive purposes" is correct?
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>I see "it's" used for possession all the time. Is it correct?
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>Ditto for "loose" when it should be "lose." Just because people get something wrong all the time doesn't make it right.
>
>Tamar

Tamar,

I certainly agree with what you are saying. My reference to Google hits was purely to establish that "recurse" is widely used, not that it is formally regarded as correct. We can use our own good judgment to decide whether the term is reasonable, and I believe that it is. On the other hand, I regard it as absolutely erroneous (albeit grammatically correct) to use the verb "recur" if one means "to invoke oneself recursively", i.e. to recurse. Since this thread involves non-native English speakers, and the discussion specifically goes into issues of semantics, I thought some clarification was called for.

Mike