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A classic example of recursion is computing the factorial, which is defined recursively by 0! := 1 and n! := n × (n - 1)!. To recursively compute its result on a given input, a recursive function calls (a copy of) itself with a different ("smaller" in some way) input and uses the result of this call to construct its result.
Data types can also be defined by mutual recursion. The most important basic example of this is a tree, which can be defined mutually recursively in terms of a forest (a list of trees). Symbolically: f: [t[1], ..., t[k]] t: v f A forest f consists of a list of trees, while a tree t consists of a pair of a value v and a forest f (its children ...
Folds can be regarded as consistently replacing the structural components of a data structure with functions and values. Lists, for example, are built up in many functional languages from two primitives: any list is either an empty list, commonly called nil ([]), or is constructed by prefixing an element in front of another list, creating what is called a cons node ( Cons(X1,Cons(X2,Cons ...
where a represents the number of recursive calls at each level of recursion, b represents by what factor smaller the input is for the next level of recursion (i.e. the number of pieces you divide the problem into), and f(n) represents the work that the function does independently of any recursion (e.g. partitioning, recombining) at each level ...
A recursive step — a set of rules that reduces all successive cases toward the base case. For example, the following is a recursive definition of a person's ancestor. One's ancestor is either: One's parent (base case), or; One's parent's ancestor (recursive step). The Fibonacci sequence is another classic example of recursion: Fib(0) = 0 as ...
In mathematics and computer science, mutual recursion is a form of recursion where two mathematical or computational objects, such as functions or datatypes, are defined in terms of each other. [1] Mutual recursion is very common in functional programming and in some problem domains, such as recursive descent parsers, where the datatypes are ...
This recursion is a primitive recursion because it computes the next value (n+1)! of the function based on the value of n and the previous value n! of the function. On the other hand, the function Fib( n ), which returns the n th Fibonacci number , is defined with the recursion equations
In combinatory logic for computer science, a fixed-point combinator (or fixpoint combinator) [1]: p.26 is a higher-order function (i.e. a function which takes a function as argument) that returns some fixed point (a value that is mapped to itself) of its argument function, if one exists.