NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #26/NN_1992_26.iso/spool/comp/lang/c/16222

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-09 | 1.2 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!ukma!darwin.sura.net!spool.mu.edu!olivea!news.bbn.com!papaya.bbn.com!cbarber
From: [e-mail] (Chris Barber)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: To Recurse or NOT to recurse?
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 9 Nov 92 17:25:00 GMT
References: <[e-mail]>
Organization: BBN Systems and Technology, Inc.
Lines: 20

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail]
(Stephen Schow) writes:
>What is better to do when traversing a linked list..... SHould I use recursion
>to search down through the list for the last node, or should I use a while
>loop?  What or the pro's and con's of each?

Recursion should usually be avoided in C for reasons of efficiency.  A
recursive linked-list traversal will require much greater overhead both for
CPU cycles (because of the instructions needed to make function calls) and
storage space (because of the use of the stack) than a while-loop traversal.
However, recursion can be appropriate if it greatly simplifies the code and
will not need to recurse very many levels, thus minimizing the cost of the
overhead.

This advice does not apply to code written in Lisp and other languages that
optimize tail-recursion.

--
Christopher Barber
([e-mail])