On Thu, 18 Jun 1998, Glynn Clements wrote:
>> (euugh! so slow and nasty) and recursion (has a few uses... maybe)
>
>I think that I would have to disagree most strongly with both of those
>remarks.
I disagree too!! Recursion is nice, the nicer and useful things for a
programmer. I love it, unfortunately sometimes it is more efficient and
lighter avoid it (for searching in linked list for example). Remeber also
that gcc just optimize out tail recursion.
Also in a _lot_ of places recursion is not slower that iteractions.
Sure he never managed trees or more ;-).
Note that also the linux kernel (I know about 2.1.x) uses recursion in
some places (following links in the fs, enable/disable_irq etc..).
Somebody tried to remove recursion but Linus right said that he like
recursion and rejected the very more complex algorithm (at least this is
what I remeber since it' s happened some month ago ;-).
>Functional techniques are far more useful than a lot of programmers
>realise. The fact that they aren't used all that much in typical
While I love recursion, I don' t like very much the functional approch to
programming (at least as it was been shown to me from one my prof at
University; after some minutes of lession about prolog my mind entered in
the kernel and jumped to idle() ;-). The functional approch seems to me
slow while recursion isn' t slow!
Andrea[s] Arcangeli
