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A recursive step — a set of rules that reduces all successive cases toward the base case. For example, the following is a recursive definition of a person's ancestor. One's ancestor is either: One's parent (base case), or; One's parent's ancestor (recursive step). The Fibonacci sequence is another classic example of recursion: Fib(0) = 0 as ...
Recursion that contains only a single self-reference is known as single recursion, while recursion that contains multiple self-references is known as multiple recursion. Standard examples of single recursion include list traversal, such as in a linear search, or computing the factorial function, while standard examples of multiple recursion ...
Most recursive definitions have two foundations: a base case (basis) and an inductive clause. The difference between a circular definition and a recursive definition is that a recursive definition must always have base cases, cases that satisfy the definition without being defined in terms of the definition itself, and that all other instances in the inductive clauses must be "smaller" in some ...
The use of Turing machines here is not necessary; there are many other models of computation that have the same computing power as Turing machines; for example the μ-recursive functions obtained from primitive recursion and the μ operator. The terminology for computable functions and sets is not completely standardized.
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.
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.
Mutual recursion is very common in functional programming, and is often used for programs written in LISP, Scheme, ML, and similar programming languages. For example, Abelson and Sussman describe how a meta-circular evaluator can be used to implement LISP with an eval-apply cycle. [7] In languages such as Prolog, mutual recursion is almost ...
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. The Ackermann function A(m,n) is a well-known example of a total recursive function (in fact, provable total), that is not primitive ...