Mjordan2nd

The books where I learned programming from were almost all opposed to using recursion, but my computer science teacher tells us to use recursion religiously. What's your opinion on using recursion? Should recursion be used, or is it better to be avoided?

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Tama

Recursion is best used where it solves the problem with considerably less effort and without being terribly inefficient. Anyone who has a strong opinion either way is needlessly restricting himself.

EdSalamander

Both recursion and iteration have their upsides and downsides. Recursion is less efficient but more versatile (and sometimes the only way to write an algorithm). Iteration on the other hand is simpler (in my opinion), sometimes faster, and usually more efficient (especially in terms of stack usage), but is much more limited in ability and scope. I generally prefer iteration, but like Tama said, don't restrict yourself by leaning to strongly one way or the other.

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Ooble

Go for both. I despised it, until I learnt about binary trees.

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Berto

Its far harder to debug a recursive algorithm, and they are more likly to lead to memory leaks and infinate loops/recursions

Infinite Recursion

Well, I need not saw what side of the fence I am on (if you aren't sure why, check my alias). Also, recursion leads to efficiency, which leads to robustness... but some things need not be recursive... if you think the code is going into iterative overkill, you can probably swap the algorithm out with a more recursive oriented one.

btw: Infinite Recursion and missing that damn semicolon at the end of my c++ programs was very common when I was in college... and not just common for me, but the whole department... its the "nature of the beast".

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Lethns

Same here

drewlander

Go for whatever gets your problem solved the best.

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Dizzutch

There are some cases where a recursive algorithm isn't more efficient, but then you get to fields like Dynamic Programming etc, of which i don't know too much. Say you need to compute x primes using a recursive algorithm. Every time you goto compute the next one, you have to start from the beginning, so you're recalculating everything x times. Dynamic programming tries to eliminate that by storing calculated values when you calculate them the first time. There's my 2 cents..

Dizz

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xaosai

Some languages are optimized for it. I write a lot of Lisp and I really dont use iteration that much because recursion works so well. I've found that you can usually solve a problem either way, but depending on the algorithm and the code one may be faster/more efficient than the other.