What is a practical difference between a loop and recursion

Question

I am currently working in PHP, so this example will be in PHP, but the question applies to multiple languages.

I am working on this project with a fiend of mine, and as

Answer 1

Recursion is a bit slower (because function calls are slower than setting a variable), and uses more space on most languages' call stacks. If you tried to printnumbers(1, 1000000000), the recursive version would likely throw a PHP fatal error or even a 500 error.

There are some cases where recursion makes sense, like doing something to every part of a tree (getting all files in a directory and its subdirectories, or maybe messing with an XML document), but it has its price -- in speed, stack footprint, and the time spent to make sure it doesn't get stuck calling itself over and over til it crashes. If a loop makes more sense, it's definitely the way to go.