[Tutor] Fwd: Re: Real world use of recursion

[Danny Yoo]

Sorry, forgot to reply to all.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Danny Yoo" <dyoo at hashcollision.org>
Date: Sep 9, 2014 10:10 PM
Subject: Re: [Tutor] Real world use of recursion
To: "Deb Wyatt" <codemonkey at inbox.com>
Cc:

>
> On Sep 9, 2014 8:07 PM, "Deb Wyatt" <codemonkey at inbox.com> 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.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/tutor/attachments/20140909/9a4f8656/attachment.html>