🚀 go-pugleaf

Joost Romeu (joost@sirius.com) wrote:
: I don't understand recursion but I have a feeling about it. I'd appreciate
: it if you could share your understandings about recursion and iteration
: with me.

: On the face of it:
:    - There's something very attractive about recursion. It seems a "smart"
: and interesting (albeit tricky and magical) way of defining, approaching,
: and solving a problem.
:    - Iteration, on the other hand, seems a ploughhorse way of trudging
: through a problem - easy to grasp and lay down; then lots of plowing...

right. Recursion is what a good computer scientist types in, iteration is
what a good compiler makes of it...

The second aspect is that these two concepts belong to different viewpoints
of a problem: recursion is a functional approach, telling the machine that
the solution of a problem depends on the solution of a very similar,
hopefully simpler problem. Iteration, on the other hand, is an imperative
approach, telling the machine to go ahead and solve a part of the problem
then step back and apply the same methods to the next part until the problem
is done.

If you don't want to worry about the philosophical consequences of your
bubble-sort-algorithm or who knows what -- just rely on bits of code other
people wrote, and pretend to be impartial.




-- 

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trancon@cs.tu-berlin.de