 What is retained in these treatments is an understanding of computation as a means of operating in an effective manner on finite combinatorial objects which can still be understood to fall under the “recursive mode of thought” as understood by early theorists such as Skolem, Hilbert, Gödel, and Péter. But at the same time, many of the basic definitions and results in recursive function theory are only indirectly related to recursive definability in the informal sense described in this section.  In light of this, Soare (1996) proposed that recursive function theory should be renamed computability theory and that we should accordingly refer to what were traditionally known as the recursive functions as the computable functions.