I'm surprised you consider that construction "simple".
It's VASTLY simpler than the alternative. See how difficult it is to express the same relationship without using the recursive grammar.
Anyway, give anyone a family tree diagram containing all of these relationships and they can follow the chain from that sentence to the destination. This is the essence of why we use recursion in computer science in the first place: it's the best tool for navigating trees.
> Anyway, give anyone a family tree diagram containing all of these relationships and they can follow the chain from that sentence to the destination. This is the essence of why we use recursion in computer science in the first place: it's the best tool for navigating trees.
This is because English sucks at tree relationships. Other languages are much better at this.
For example, Mandarine Chinese has unique words for each side of the family tree (e.g. unique word for Grandma on mother's side vs Grandma on Father's Side), and also a rather logical system to describe how you navigate the tree.
Chinese isn't even unique in this, it is just that English is really really bad.
Is having a unique word that much of an improvement over "paternal grandmother" vs "maternal grandmother"?
Or is it that you're referring to other relations than those two having unique words? If so then that would seem to introduce its own problems in ballooning the vocabulary.
It's VASTLY simpler than the alternative. See how difficult it is to express the same relationship without using the recursive grammar.
Anyway, give anyone a family tree diagram containing all of these relationships and they can follow the chain from that sentence to the destination. This is the essence of why we use recursion in computer science in the first place: it's the best tool for navigating trees.