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Remember that not everyone writes code that is designed to run on a machine with lots of RAM. Loops vs Recursion can be a proper engineering trade off when reso

• tombert 7y ago
  Sure, and I'm not saying you should never write with the loop+stack/list option; right tool, right job. I'm just saying that there are certain jobs that lend themselves to recursion, and one shouldn't discount it as some purely-academic bit of fun; it's a useful tool to have in your arsenal. If you have reason to worry about a stack overflow or something similar, you probably shouldn't be using recursion for that project; if you're working in an environment where you aren't going to realistically hit those restraints (like in my case), recursion is incredibly valuable sometimes. That said, even though I'm somewhat of an FP zealot, I think whenever possible (about 9*% of the time), you should use a looping function like `map`, `filter`, `reduce`, or even the Java-style enhanced-for-loop instead of recursion.