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On 7/19/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb / cesmail.net> wrote:
>
> Logan Capaldo wrote:
>
> > You've never written code to traverse some kind of tree? And if you
> have,
> > you did it all iteratively? I would suggest _lots_ of programmers use
> > recursion, even in C.
>
> There's a big difference between an explicit stack with iterative code
> and recursion with an implicit stack. I've done a lot of explicit stack
> coding for walking data structures -- indeed, the last time I did so was
> a recent piece of code that generates the state space of a large finite
> Markov chain. But the only time I've written recursive functions as a
> *preferred* modus operandi has been in Lisp, Scheme and the Lisp-based
> symbolic math package Derive. And there, I've always aimed for tail
> recursion.
> >


Interesting. This is wild speculation of course, but I imagine you are
probably atypical as far as always using explicit stacks. (Since I get the
impression from your post history that you are heavily focused on
performance.). I would guess (more speculation ;)) that if someone were to
grab a set of programs that for instance walked an XML DOM (or a similar day
to day tree structure, like a nested directory) that the vast majority of
those programs would use recursion with implicit stacks. Now that I've
contributed that bit of unsubstantiated nonsense, I'll resume eating my
dinner. :)

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