I'd say you picked a bad example. Factorial is a tail recursive function, which performs relatively badly. Calculating factorials with recursion is a nice example to introduce recursive programming. But an interative solution is well known to be much faster, without significant more code. (Your "global" and "lexical" solution are almost identical, which I call "iterative". Your closure solution doesn't make use a closure, all it does is return a code reference to an iterative solution).

There is another standard algorithm that has a elegant recursive solution: mergesort. Your "benchmark" would be far more interesting with mergesort than with factorials. And make sure to test data sets of different sizes.

Abigail

In reply to Re: Recursion Alternatives? by Abigail-II
in thread Recursion Alternatives? by Cabrion

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.