week 7 recursion

The topic of this week is about recursion. In my opinion, recursion is one of the most difficult parts in csc148, but it is also the most useful part. It can help us make the code simpler and convenient. At the beginning of this semester, I started to get some knowledge of recursive function. When I did the assignment 1, using recursion is the most important part. I needed to decide when I should use the recursion and understood how recursion works. For example, moving cheeses with 4 stools needs us to think about how to move cheeses with 3 stools, how to get the result with the smallest steps, and how to use the destination stool and intermediate stool correctly. In addition to the moving cheeses, getting the greatest common denominator and binary representation both are about recursive function. Recursion helps us solving problem more efficiently because we don’t need to write too many codes.

The lab of this week is about linked list. My partner and I didn’t finish. We spent too much time writing long and difficult codes and when we ran it, always got error. Using recursion to get the length of a linked list is much easier.

This week I also learned something about Fibonacci sequence in math lecture. Recursion helps me understand the sequence well. Recursion is not only used in computer science, but also used in math. I know recursion is very helpful, but does the recursion have some diadvantages?