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The use of an initial value is necessary when the combining function f is asymmetrical in its types (e.g. a → b → b), i.e. when the type of its result is different from the type of the list's elements. Then an initial value must be used, with the same type as that of f 's result, for a linear chain of applications to be possible. Whether it ...
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 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.
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
For example, it is common to identify the truth value with the number and the truth value with the number . Once this identification has been made, the characteristic function of a set A {\displaystyle A} , which always returns 1 {\displaystyle 1} or 0 {\displaystyle 0} , can be viewed as a predicate that tells whether a number is in the set A ...
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