On Friday, June 20, 2003, at 04:35 PM,
email@hidden wrote:
>>
>> Lazy programmers! Extremely lazy programmers I call them! :) It would
>> probably even be quite a bit faster as well if they removed the
>> recursion.
>
> Indeed - hasn't it been proven that any recursive algorithm can be
> reimplemented iteratively?
>
> Recursion may be elegant, but stack space limits it badly, and it's
> almost always slower, because of all of the function calling overhead
> (function calls also tend to defeat the optimisations modern compilers
> could make if the implementation were iterative).
>
That's as may be, but for some things it just doesn't make sense. Can
you conceive of writing alpha-beta or iterative deepening search
non-recursively? It just doesn't make sense, and makes a mess of the
programming by mixing the algorithm with details of its implementation
at the lowest level. Fortunately, this doesn't usually seem to be a
problem [yet] for search algorithms. But I'm sure there are other
problems that are similar, where doing the recursion "manually" is
counter-intuitive and counter-productive.
Markian
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