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Bad programmers use recursion (Offtopic was Re: XML

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• Subject: Bad programmers use recursion (Offtopic was Re: XML
• Subject: Bad programmers use recursion (Offtopic was Re: XML Performance in a Transacation)
• From: "Rick Jelliffe" <rjelliffe@a...>
• Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 15:50:14 +1000 (EST)
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Tatu Saloranta said:

> There's nothing new there I guess; new CS students are
> taught recursion in all the wrong places, and
> generally learn quickly enough not to calculate
> multiplication by recursive addition by one.

On that subject, for text programming, the use of recursion is almost
always the sign of an inexperienced or poor programmer. The worst offender
in this is the Java REGEX package, which is almost useless for large
document text processing, because of stack growth in some pathological
cases with some harmless-looking regular expressions.

Tree-walking and small-stack problems are a different kettle of fish, of
course. Or when using languages with the tail-recursion optimization, of
course.

Cheers
Rick

• Follow-Ups:
  • RE: Bad programmers use recursion (Offtopic was Re: XML Performance in a Transacation)
    • From: "Michael Kay" <mike@s...>
  • Re: Bad programmers use recursion (Offtopic was Re: XML Performance in a Transacation)
    • From: Stefan Tilkov <info@t...>

• References:
  • Re: XML Performance in a Transacation
    • From: "Rick Jelliffe" <rjelliffe@a...>
  • Re: XML Performance in a Transacation
    • From: Tatu Saloranta <cowtowncoder@y...>

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