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RE: Bad programmers use recursion (Offtopic was Re:

• To: "'Rick Jelliffe'" <rjelliffe@a...>,<xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: Bad programmers use recursion (Offtopic was Re: XML Performance in a Transacation)
• From: "Michael Kay" <mike@s...>
• Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 15:23:28 +0100
• In-reply-to: <40133.60.229.226.213.1143352214.squirrel@i...>
• Thread-index: AcZQon7dfjSjmpI5R3eR7vn0ibVPygAPT52A

> On that subject, for text programming, the use of recursion is almost
> always the sign of an inexperienced or poor programmer.

Odd then that I find myself using recursion more and more as my programming
career moves into its fourth decade. It's partly, of course, the result of
exposure to functional programming languages: this often means that the
recursive solution is the first thing you think of rather than the last.
It's also partly because most code isn't performance-critical.

But with the caveat "for text programming" I see your point: I find
recursive code very natural when dealing with recursive data structures
(trees) but less natural when dealing with linear data (sequences and
strings).

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/

• References:
  • Bad programmers use recursion (Offtopic was Re: XML
    • From: "Rick Jelliffe" <rjelliffe@a...>

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