Comment by dreamcompiler
17 hours ago
This is overly simplistic.
Is a binary tree recursive from the perspective of a type declaration? Yes.
Is it recursive from the point of view of search? Depends. If you're doing depth-first search, then you need a stack and a recursive algorithm seems natural. If you're doing breadth-first search, then you need a queue and the algorithm is less obviously recursive.
In either case the program could be expressed recursively or as an explicit loop. When a stack is needed, the underlying hardware always provides automatic stack management so recursion feels natural in that case.
When a queue is needed it's more of a tossup since hardware and programming languages don't generally provide automatic queue management, so you're going to need to manage that data structure manually anyway. In which case whether you choose to use recursion or not is more of a personal preference.
> When a stack is needed, the underlying hardware always provides automatic stack management so recursion feels natural in that case.
Not true at all. Eg Risc-V provides no stack management at all. But compilers and interpreters exist, so it doesn't make a difference to how your high level code 'feels'.
So a tree is easier to do recursing vs iterating in some cases, whereas in other cases recursion and iteration have roughly the same level of complexity.
Kinda shows that recursive data structures are usually better dealt with recursion. Worst case you end up with the same level of difficulty as iteration.
My career is practically built on the fact that other people 99% of the miss the simplest representation of the data/problem.
Just look at myriad ways that people implement something like checking win conditions in Rock, Paper, Scissors. Switch statements, conditional hell, etc.
...you can just do something as simple as stick Rock, Scissors, Paper into a circular list and compare to the next element. It's practically readable as plain English. No programming skill required.
If you need to code golf you can use modulo arithmetic, for a different kind of "simple", but then you lose readability.
You could have a big pattern-match statement for Rock, Scissors, Paper and it would still be readable (in a language that supports these things like eg Rust).
The circular list seems a bit too cute for me. Sure, it's possible, but seems like overkill.
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