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

Maybe your professor hasn't taught it yet, but it sounds like you're ready to learn the advantages and disadvantages of recursion.

The main advantage of recursion is that recursive algorithms are often much easier and quicker to write.

The main disadvantage of recursion is that recursive algorithms can cause stack overflows, since each level of recursion requires an additional stack frame to be added to the stack.

For production code, where scaling can result in many more levels of recursion in production than in the programmer's unit tests, the disadvantage usually outweighs the advantage, and recursive code is often avoided when practical.