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The recursive program above is tail-recursive; it is equivalent to an iterative algorithm, and the computation shown above shows the steps of evaluation that would be performed by a language that eliminates tail calls. Below is a version of the same algorithm using explicit iteration, suitable for a language that does not eliminate tail calls.
Recursion in computer programming is exemplified when a function is defined in terms of simpler, often smaller versions of itself. The solution to the problem is then devised by combining the solutions obtained from the simpler versions of the problem. One example application of recursion is in parsers for programming languages. The great ...
A recursive formal language is a recursive subset in the set of all possible words over the alphabet of the language. A recursive language is a formal language for which there exists a Turing machine that, when presented with any finite input string , halts and accepts if the string is in the language, and halts and rejects otherwise.
Left recursion often poses problems for parsers, either because it leads them into infinite recursion (as in the case of most top-down parsers) or because they expect rules in a normal form that forbids it (as in the case of many bottom-up parsers [clarification needed]). Therefore, a grammar is often preprocessed to eliminate the left recursion.
An equivalent definition states that a partial recursive function is one that can be computed by a Turing machine. 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.
Tail recursion modulo cons is a generalization of tail-recursion optimization introduced by David H. D. Warren [9] in the context of compilation of Prolog, seen as an explicitly set once language. It was described (though not named) by Daniel P. Friedman and David S. Wise in 1974 [10] as a LISP compilation technique. As the name suggests, it ...
Computability theory, also known as recursion theory, is a branch of mathematical logic, computer science, and the theory of computation that originated in the 1930s with the study of computable functions and Turing degrees. The field has since expanded to include the study of generalized computability and definability.
Some types of programming languages, known as functional programming languages, are designed such that they do not set up a block of statements for explicit repetition, as with the for loop. Instead, those programming languages exclusively use recursion. Rather than call out a block of code to be repeated a pre-defined number of times, the ...