Why is recursion so slow?

[Antoon Pardon]

On 2008-06-29, slix <notnorwegian at yahoo.se> wrote:
> Recursion is awesome for writing some functions, like searching trees
> etc but wow how can it be THAT much slower for computing fibonacci-
> numbers?

Try the following recursive function:

def fib(n):

  def gfib(a, b , n):
    if n == 0:
      return a
    else:
      return gfib(b, a + b, n - 1)

  return gfib(0, 1, n)

-- 
Antoon Pardon