this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
31 points (91.9% liked)
Programming
17576 readers
136 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I haven't contemplated this question before so my answer may be incomplete or incorrect, and I've also had like two double scotches, but I feel like the answer is when something is iterative, you can have a job half done and know when it is. For example adding a field to every object in a list has a definite midpoint whether you calculate it or not.
Recursion is for things that are either 100% done or not done at all. In other words until you determine all the elements, you can't and haven't done anything. For example, parsing that includes matched brackets. You can't possibly know anything until you've found the last bracket.