Question

what is the difference between recursion and iteration in C, and their advantages and disadvantages?

Answer 1

iteration are sequence of steps which are executed one by one one after another style and for recursion goto http://www.tuhinrawat.co.cc

Answer 2

iteration its better than recursion

iteration its just some steps that repeats a number of times

Recursion its a type of function that depends on it self, example factorial:

fact(n) = n*fact(n-1)
fact(1) = 1;

Its quite similar to a itaration as u will repeat almost the same step over till u get to the base case, but its a functon.

Iteration its faster than recursion, as calling a function involves several steps using the stack to save registers and other things. Although some compilers that optimizes can notice special cases of recursoin where u can transform them to an iteration (i dont know the english term, but in spanish its "recusion de cola", those where there isnt any instruction after the recursion call)

Answer 3

"iteration its better than recursion"?!?
Try telling that to the monks working on their towers of Hanoi!

Answer 4

Iteration is not "better" than recursion in all cases. You can express some algorithms in a much cleaner way using recursion. If you know the recursion depth will never be very deep the cost of the extra stack frames is worth it.

Answer 5

Finally, some languages are based on the concept of recursion. Functional languages are for instance. But in these cases tail recursion is optimized and becomes a loop under the hood.

Answer 6

Oh and the optimization fedep3 was referring to is indeed tail recursion optimization.

Answer 7

well what i meant its that iteration its better in time. Of course tons of problems u can see it more easly as a recursion: quicksort, mergesort, algorithm in trees, dfs, etc.

Answer 8

oh..ok.. thank you so much guys! that made my report! :)