Recursion vs Iteration

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2 total messages Started by Joost Romeu Fri, 20 Oct 1995 19:05

#627

Author: Joost Romeu
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 1995 19:05

16 lines
913 bytes

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...

Is this just a beginner's appreciation of a new concept or does it hold
true in time.

thanks
(please also email reply)

Re: Recursion vs Iteration

#803

Author: Baltasar Trancon-y-Widemann
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 1995 21:44

34 lines
1866 bytes

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.




-- 

--
trancon@cs.tu-berlin.de

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