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Short-circuiting the base case, also known as arm's-length recursion, consists of checking the base case before making a recursive call – i.e., checking if the next call will be the base case, instead of calling and then checking for the base case. Short-circuiting is particularly done for efficiency reasons, to avoid the overhead of a ...
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 ...
Another technical point is that, in the case of left folds using lazy evaluation, the new initial parameter is not being evaluated before the recursive call is made. This can lead to stack overflows when one reaches the end of the list and tries to evaluate the resulting potentially gigantic expression.
For these cases, optimizing tail recursion remains trivial, but general tail-call optimization may be harder to implement efficiently. For example, in the Java virtual machine (JVM), tail-recursive calls can be eliminated (as this reuses the existing call stack), but general tail calls cannot be (as this changes the call stack).
Recursive function may refer to: Recursive function (programming), a function which references itself; General recursive function, a computable partial function from natural numbers to natural numbers Primitive recursive function, a function which can be computed with loops of bounded length; Another name for computable function
This mutually recursive definition can be converted to a singly recursive definition by inlining the definition of a forest: t: v [t[1], ..., t[k]] A tree t consists of a pair of a value v and a list of trees (its children). This definition is more compact, but somewhat messier: a tree consists of a pair of one type and a list another, which ...
In computer science, a recursive descent parser is a kind of top-down parser built from a set of mutually recursive procedures (or a non-recursive equivalent) where each such procedure implements one of the nonterminals of the grammar. Thus the structure of the resulting program closely mirrors that of the grammar it recognizes. [1] [2]
A total recursive function is a partial recursive function that is defined for every input. Every primitive recursive function is total recursive, but not all total recursive functions are primitive recursive. The Ackermann function A(m,n) is a well-known example of a total recursive function (in fact, provable total), that is not primitive ...