Roman Cheplyaka:
If you're saying that in C an explicit stack should have been used instead of recursion, then it would increase the code complexity while having non-obvious performance benefits.
This is a fragment of a bigger message I won't comment.
But THIS is a little dubious. You may accuse anything of anything by such vacuous statements as "non-obvious performance benefits". If the stack frame allocation policy is lousy (not because of incompetence of the compiler writers, but because of its "universalism"), then the gain may be quite visible. My favourite examples are the classical "flood fill" algorithms for filling closed regions in computer graphics, and also some models of percolation (finding paths in rather big graphs). Everything depends on the language used, but I have seen the acceleration by a factor of 5 after having replaced the recursion by explicit stacks + loops.
Jerzy Karczmarczuk _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
