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

I can't reproduce your timing results (in Python 2.6.1 on Mac OS X):

>>> import itertools, timeit
>>> timeit.timeit('list(all_perms("0123456789"))', 
...               setup='from __main__ import all_perms'),
...               number=1)
2.603626012802124
>>> timeit.timeit('list(itertools.permutations("0123456789"))', number=1)
1.6111600399017334