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Re: Bad programmers use recursion (Offtopic was Re:

• To: Michael Kay <mike@s...>
• Subject: Re: Bad programmers use recursion (Offtopic was Re: XML Performance in a Transacation)
• From: Rick Marshall <rjm@z...>
• Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 13:09:53 +1000
• Cc: "'Rick Jelliffe'" <rjelliffe@a...>, xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <200603261421.k2QELTdf005406@z...>
• Organization: Zenucom Pty Ltd
• References: <200603261421.k2QELTdf005406@z...>
• User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7-1.1.fc4 (X11/20050929)

guess i'm a youngster (only 3 decades experience) - but i still find 
recursion essential - it works best as michael says on tree structures, 
particularly with unknown depth. there's an elegance about it and a 
reliability that is difficult to match. often with these problems what 
you gain by not using recursive function calls you lose in state 
maintenance. on the other hand there's nothing like a pointer to rapidly 
digest text.

ps if you're worried about function calls, what about some good old 
fashioned macros. in many cases you get the beauty of the function call 
with the speed of inline. this can be very significant, but it sadly it 
won't fix our o(n^2) problem.

rick

Michael Kay wrote:

>>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/
>
>
>
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