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DrupalDave (talk | contribs) Fixed typo in last sentence: naive seemed wrong, native seems correct. Tags: Reverted Mobile edit Mobile web edit |
Mindmatrix (talk | contribs) revert - in this case, naive implies the simple or basic implementation |
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Most computer [[programming language]]s support recursion by allowing a function to call itself from within its own code. Some [[functional programming]] languages (for instance, [[Clojure]])<ref>{{Cite web|title=Functional Programming {{!}} Clojure for the Brave and True|url=https://www.braveclojure.com/functional-programming/#Recursion_Instead_of_for_while|access-date=2020-10-21|website=www.braveclojure.com}}</ref> do not define any looping constructs but rely solely on recursion to repeatedly call code. It is proved in [[computability theory]] that these recursive-only languages are [[turing completeness|Turing complete]]; this means that they are as powerful (they can be used to solve the same problems) as [[imperative language]]s based on control structures such as {{code|while}} and {{code|for}}.
Repeatedly calling a function from within itself may cause the [[call stack]] to have a size equal to the sum of the input sizes of all involved calls. It follows that, for problems that can be solved easily by iteration, recursion is generally less [[algorithmic efficiency|efficient]], and, for certain problems, algorithmic or compiler-optimization techniques such as [[tail call]] optimization may improve computational performance over a
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