I recommend searching the web for "tail recursion" and "recursion vs. iteration" to see just how similar recursion and iterative loops really are. If you have time, get your hands on The Little Lisper or its descendent The Little Schemer and work through the whole thing including the exercises. It's another language, sure, but both are very influential languages and the books are really good at imparting some recursion wisdom. The Little Schemer even has sequels The Seasoned Schemer and The Reasoned Schemer which I'm told are also very good.

In reply to Re: Recursively executed function in regex RHS, AKA "wait, why does this work?" by mr_mischief
in thread Recursively executed function in regex RHS, AKA "wait, why does this work?" by Cody Fendant

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.