[Tutor] recursion

[Alan Gauld]

On 15/08/2022 18:19, Mats Wichmann wrote:

>> There are things like traversing trees which are harder to do without
>> recursion but Fibonacci is absolutely trivial to do 

The other common recursion function is factorial() and
that too is nearly trivial to do non-recursively. But
traversing trees etc and other real-world uses of
recursion are a lot harder to teach! (You need to teach
trees for a start!)

I suspect the problem is that recursio is introduced
too early in the curriculum, but teachers like it
because it's cool from an academic standpoint and
can help teach a regular approach to designing programs.
(see the online book "How to Design Programs" for
an example of the approach...http://htdp.org)

-- 
Alan G
Author of the Learn to Program web site
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