20 Oct
2005
20 Oct
'05
12:34 p.m.
Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:
It was thus said that the Great John R. Hogerhuis once
stated:
Recursion makes a lot of sorting/searching algorithms much cleaner too.
Plus, IMHO the recursive factorial (x!) algorithm looks a lot less
complicated.
Peace... Sridhar
A recursive algorithm can be quite elegant and
easier to understand in a
limited, useless educational example. But once you start adding all the
little bells and whistles (like, say, exception handling) it quickly
becomes a hairy mess.
I used to think that recursion was useless, due to the examples given in
school, like multiplication, the Fibonacci sequence or the Towers of Hanoi,
but in the past few years, I've found a few places (only a few) where it
does lead to a clean implementation, usually dealing with tree-structured
data, like a file system: