NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/lang/c-part2/11429

Internet Message Format | 1996-08-05 | 2.0 KB

Path: mail2news.demon.co.uk!genesis.demon.co.uk
From: Lawrence Kirby <[e-mail]>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: REQUEST: Recursive functions
Date: Sun, 24 Mar 96 01:24:55 GMT
Organization: none
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
References: <4h7lft$[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Reply-To: [e-mail]
X-NNTP-Posting-Host: genesis.demon.co.uk
X-Newsreader: Demon Internet Simple News v1.27
X-Mail2News-Path: genesis.demon.co.uk

In article <[e-mail]>
           [e-mail] "Tarang Deshpande" writes:

>Michael Talmage wrote:
>>
>> I need some help to write a recursive function that will move a mouse through
>> a maze to find some cheese at the end.  My instructor did not really teach us
>> how to write recursive functions in class.  Any help will be appreciated.
>>
>
>I'm not going to tell you the answer but here is a quick leson in
>recursion.  First of all anything you do recursively can be done
>using loops.  But using loops is more complicated and cumbersome whereas
>recursion is more elegant and simple.

In the relatively few cases that model well recursively that is true,
otherwise it is not. This is somewhat language dependent but you are
posting to comp.lang.c.

> However this does not mean that
>you should always use recusion because recursion make heavy use of the
>stack and this can cause you to run out of memory.

Even if the C language guaranteed tail-end recursion elimination you
would still write iterative loops as loops.

>What recusion does is to divide the problem into two or more parts.

It defines the problem in terms of a simpler form of itself. It must
eventually reach a point where the solution can be determined directly or
some other termination condition for it to be valid (i.e. not continue
on indefinitely).

--
-----------------------------------------
Lawrence Kirby | [e-mail]
Wilts, England | [e-mail]
-----------------------------------------