Is deep recursion bad? Yes and no.

No, it's not bad because:

• In general, recursion is a very elegant solution to a lot of tree-walking and other, similarly structured problems.
• The code you write is more elgant (cleaner) and will be easier to maintain and less likely to contain obscure bugs that are hard to track down.

Yes, it is bad because:

• Recursion is a memory and resource HOG. It's much more efficient to code the solution using global variables.

Like most things, there is a trade off between the two. I guess that in your case, the real questions are:

1. Is performance a problem and/or goal?
2. If so, does performance hit outweigh code readability?

And of couse performance is a relative term in itself. What is a performance issue on my old 486 with a whoping 16MB of RAM is not an issue on my 1Ghz iMac with half a gig of RAM.

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