RE: Recursive Code Challenge

[George Gatling (Contractor)]

Well, in my own case, I find recursive code to be somewhat more readable... 
something to go through and list all of the files in a directory and all of 
its sub directories is pretty trivial with recursion, but gets much more 
messy if implemented with ordinary iteration.  But that's just my own 
personal take... I am sure there are people out there that find the 
iterative approach more readable.  Also, with regard to memory management, 
in the recursive case you throw the burden of efficiency onto NI while in 
the iterative case you assume much more of that burden yourself.

In either case if is very infrequent that I use recursion in LabVIEW... so 
I don't lose too much sleep over it either way.

Salut!
At 10:13 AM 6/4/2004, you wrote:
Couldn't you just allocate a big enough stack to begin with, or allocate 
chunks of it as you go on(initialize and resize array) and get an 
efficient behavior?

It seems to me that recursion is needed when you you didn't think you 
would have needed it in the first place!!!(design phase)

-----Message d'origine-----
De : Jean-Pierre Drolet [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Envoyé : June 4, 2004 9:51 AM
À : Dominic Lavoie; Info-LabVIEW
Objet : Re: Recursive Code Challenge
Salut,
You are right. Formally, recursion can always be emulated with a data 
stack and a while loop.
Using a recursive call, the data stack is managed automatically as data 
space is created for each recursion level. The cost in
LabVIEW is efficiency.

A recursive call makes the code more simple to design. The recursive 
nature of the code is explicit which is not the case with a
while loop.

Other than that, there are no clear advantage for the recusive call.
Jean-Pierre Drolet
www.avensys.ca

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dominic Lavoie" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Info-LabVIEW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, June 04, 2004 9:15 AM
Subject: RE: Recursive Code Challenge
Salut.
Could someone explain in a simple way what are the advantages of making a 
function recursive instead of just making the data
recursive(arrays or strings) and building one function to play with that 
data(while loops)?


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