Division By Repeated Subtraction
May 12, 2017
I traded several emails this week with a programming student who was having trouble with this assignment:
Write a function that divides two numbers and returns their quotient. Use recursive subtraction to find the quotient.
The student went on to explain that he thought he needed to use a counter variable that he incremented each time the function recurred, but he didn’t know how to do that because the function could only take two arguments; it had to be of the form (define (divide a b) ...).
Your task is to write the function, and explain to the student how it works. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.
Programming Praxis 