> On that subject, for text programming, the use of recursion is almost
> always the sign of an inexperienced or poor programmer.
Odd then that I find myself using recursion more and more as my programming
career moves into its fourth decade. It's partly, of course, the result of
exposure to functional programming languages: this often means that the
recursive solution is the first thing you think of rather than the last.
It's also partly because most code isn't performance-critical.
But with the caveat "for text programming" I see your point: I find
recursive code very natural when dealing with recursive data structures
(trees) but less natural when dealing with linear data (sequences and
strings).
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
