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In computer science, anonymous recursion is recursion which does not explicitly call a function by name. This can be done either explicitly, by using a higher-order function – passing in a function as an argument and calling it – or implicitly, via reflection features which allow one to access certain functions depending on the current ...
Most computer programming languages support recursion by allowing a function to call itself from within its own code. Some functional programming languages (for instance, Clojure) [5] do not define any looping constructs but rely solely on recursion to repeatedly call code.
The function calls itself recursively on a smaller version of the input (n - 1) and multiplies the result of the recursive call by n, until reaching the base case, analogously to the mathematical definition of factorial. Recursion in computer programming is exemplified when a function is defined in terms of simpler, often smaller versions of ...
Most modern implementations of a function call use a call stack, a special case of the stack data structure, to implement function calls and returns. Each procedure call creates a new entry, called a stack frame , at the top of the stack; when the procedure returns, its stack frame is deleted from the stack, and its space may be used for other ...
When a function has to tail-call another, instead of calling it directly and then returning the result, it returns the address of the function to be called and the call parameters back to the trampoline (from which it was called itself), and the trampoline takes care of calling this function next with the specified parameters.
In computer programming, an anonymous function (function literal, expression or block) is a function definition that is not bound to an identifier. Anonymous functions are often arguments being passed to higher-order functions or used for constructing the result of a higher-order function that needs to return a function. [ 1 ]
When a function calls itself recursively, a return address needs to be stored for each activation of the function so that it can later be used to return from the function activation. Stack structures provide this capability automatically.
This can also be done without mutual recursion, for example by still having separate functions for each production rule, but having them called by a single controller function, or by putting all the grammar in a single function. Mutual recursion can also implement a finite-state machine, with one function for each state, and single recursion in ...