In a few languages, Scheme being one of them, there are no built-in iteration constructs.

I think that this is the source of many people fascination with tail recursion. It appeals to the minimalist mentality very much so, (who needs iteration when you have an tail-recursion optimizing compiler). Personally I find such minimalism distateful, which is probably one of the reasons I like Perl.

I have to say that I think iterative solutions tend to have less suprise bugs than recursive. My experience is that recursive solutions often hide hard to find bugs in exceptional cases, but that the same bug in an iterative solution usually results in the algorithm failing completely. So personally I think that reducing recusrion as much as possible is a good thing. I am also perfectly ready to admit that many others who I hold in considerable respect diasgree. :-) I will grant though that as the code scale increases removing recursion becomes more and more difficult.


---
demerphq

<Elian> And I do take a kind of perverse pleasure in having an OO assembly language...

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Iterative vs Recursive Processes by demerphq
in thread Iterative vs Recursive Processes by mvaline

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.