danger of recursive functions

Question

Often people say that it\'s not recommended to use recursive functions in python (recursion depth restrictions, memory consumption, etc)

I took a permutation example

Answer 1

Recursion is good for problems that lend themselves to clean, clear, recursive implementations. But like all programming you must perform some algorithm analysis to understand the performance characteristics. In the case of recursion, besides number of operations you must also estimate the maximum stack depth.

Most problems occur when new programmers assume recursion is magical and don't realize there is a stack underneath making it possible. New programmers have also been known to allocate memory and never free it, and other mistakes, so recursion is not unique in this danger.