Iterative vs. Recursive coding

[Aahz]

In article <4c6e9de9$0$23142$426a74cc at news.free.fr>,
Bruno Desthuilliers  <bruno.42.desthuilliers at websiteburo.invalid> wrote:
>Steven D'Aprano a écrit :
>> On Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:00:16 +0000, Martin Gregorie wrote:
>>> 
>>> Recursion can be quite a trick to get your mind round at first
>> 
>> Really? Do people actually find the *concept* of recursion to be tricky?
>
>I onced worked in a shop (Win32 desktop / accouting applications mainly) 
>where I was the only guy that could actually understand recursion. FWIW, 
>I also was the only guy around that understood "hairy" (lol) concepts 
>like callback functions, FSM, polymorphism, hashtables, linked lists, 
>ADTs, algorithm complexity etc...

To some extent, the question here is the definition of "understand" being
used.  It probably would be reasonable to say that I have only a cookbook
level understanding of recursion, and the same would apply to callback
functions, FSM, linked lists, and so on.  (I mostly think I do really
understand polymorphism and hashtables.)
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"...if I were on life-support, I'd rather have it run by a Gameboy than a
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