Sorry, forgot to reply to all. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Danny Yoo" <[email protected]> Date: Sep 9, 2014 10:10 PM Subject: Re: [Tutor] Real world use of recursion To: "Deb Wyatt" <[email protected]> Cc:
> > On Sep 9, 2014 8:07 PM, "Deb Wyatt" <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Sorry to bother you all with what you might consider trivia, but someone in my course forum posted this statement: > > > > "I have never seen or heard of real uses of recursion except for proving cleverness," > > Then they haven't seen much yet. > > Particularly, they may not realize it, but processing HTML is all about dealing with recursive data structures. > > Or they haven't written a compiler, in which case is all about recursive walks over tree structures. > > Or they haven't done any data processing involving parsing with recursive descent. > > Or they haven't done any optimization problems where knowing recursion completely opens up dynamic programming techniques. > > In short, heck yes I use it! Recursion is a tool, a standard technique that a professional programmer should have in their tool belt. Maybe not every program uses it, but it comes up enough that the comment from the forum is laughably wrong.
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