Prelude to Computer Science: Recursion Hints

[epicswell]

Thanks sir, some great pieces of advice there. Pen and paper first then so...

[daambassador1]

thanks bud -- good insight ;)

[anforhell69]

Which book, you refered?

[TheFallibleFiend]

No specific book. I'm assuming that the person watching this is taking a class that is using a book to cover the basics of some computer language. Regardless of the the particular book, there should be a part in it that talks about the method used to pass arguments to functions: reference, value, etc. The book should have some detail about what each of those methods means. Good to understand that before attempting recursion.

[Ganjin88]

I believe your right. My professor this summer talk about it for less than 2 minutes. And guess what? She put it on the last exam we had last week. Plenty of student had 60's and 50's. In my opinion, I dont think it was a fair test because the book never had anything on recursive functions and she only talked about it for approximately 2 minutes.

:(

[Tiwaking]

There were some excellent points that are not addressed in Computer Science textbooks such as "Pass by value in Java can sometimes look like pass by reference". Also: Great example of the theoretical use of recursion

[TheFallibleFiend]

tx for feedback,

tff

[isilder]

recursion is useful for handling the case where the data structure for a sequentional, iterative style is hard.

It even avoids the need for having access to memory allocation function calls.

Of course, a stack data structure can do the same as any recursive algorithm, since recursion just makes a data structure on the cpu's stack !

[TheFallibleFiend]

Good point. Recursion is very good for graph (including tree or linked list) traversal. Also good to hone understanding of scope, storage class, & parameter passing. Implementing with stack is a good way to hone understanding of details of how recursion works. I agree with teaching recursion to intro students, but disagree with testing them on it.