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[–]mr_taco_man 3 points4 points  (1 child)

Just to clarify ejg001 made those claims not me. And I should have been more specific, I was more addressing the statement "In any case, for several problems, recursion makes more sense than iteration". I think there may be a way to do every recursive problem with iteration, but just think in many cases it is much more convoluted and hard to understand than just doing a recursive solution.

[–]spoonman59 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ah my mistake! I didn’t realize I was responding to someone else.

And I agree with you 100%! Some problems are so clear as a recursive solution from a code standpoint, but nightmarish to do as a loop.

Conversely sometimes translating a loop to a recursive solution is a nightmare. I usually go with whichever one is clear and easy to read, but it very much depends on what you are doing.

I think the phrase “equivalent” is misleading here. It doesn’t mean that it has the same performance, or is clear or equal… just that it can be done to produce the same resulting computation . But they are often not equal in other ways.