[Tutor] Re: Recursion....what are the best situations to use it?

[John Fouhy]

Andrei wrote:
> Recursion is dangerous if its depth is unchecked. I've recently seen a recursive
> quicksort implementation run wild for example, killing the program without any
> error message (not in Python, but the principle is the same regardless the
> programming language).

I recall an assignment I once had for an algorithms course --- I think 
it was to implement and analyse Strassen's algorithm.

My recursive algorithm would run out of stack space when the input 
matrices got too large.  But I was programming in Java, and the JVM 
allows you to set the stack size.

So, by plotting input size when it crashes vs stack size, I was able to 
get a nice graph displaying the space complexity of the algorithm :-)

-- 
John.