Recursion

Abstract

Recursion has an undeserved reputation for being hard to do and hard to control. For various reasons, many developers have trouble using recursion as one of their programming tools. I suspect the difficulty stems from two predicaments: having to give up control so that the recursive classes or methods can do their work and not being able to “see” the recursion work (though the debugger can solve the latter problem). Also, the first try at recursion usually ends poorly, resulting in an infinite loop (that is, a process that never stops), and software developers are trained to be very wary of infinite loops. All of these problems can be overcome with surprisingly easy-to-use and easy-to-understand techniques, which I’ll address later in the chapter.