Is recursion a feature in and of itself?

Question

...or is it just a practice?

I\'m asking this because of an argument with my professor: I lost credit for calling a function recursively on the basis that we did not cov

Answer 1

Deducting points because "we didn't cover recursion in class" is awful. If you learnt how to call function A which calls function B which calls function C which returns back to B which returns back to A which returns back to the caller, and the teacher didn't tell you explicitly that these must be different functions (which would be the case in old FORTRAN versions, for example), there is no reason that A, B and C cannot all be the same function.

On the other hand, we'd have to see the actual code to decide whether in your particular case using recursion is really the right thing to do. There are not many details, but it does sound wrong.