Need help from more experienced programmers (MATLAB)

[elbarto_87]

I think it would depend on what problem you are trying to solve. I do not think reversing a list with recursion would be any slower then useing a loop but it does have limitations such as the maximum recursion depth which you need to be mindful of if you need to change it for larger problems.

Something like calculating the nth Fibonacci number using recursion would probably be much slower than useing a loop?

I am not very experienced with recursion nor am I an "experienced" programmer so I make no claim that my thoughts above are accurate.

XCan, your method of using a cell array is probably a more favorable method, but depending on that actual problem the OP was trying to solve I thought establishing a single base case and using recursion could possibly simplify the problem considerably as you mentioned.

Regards Elbarto

[bzm3r]

Recursion in general is slower than doing things using a loop, or your own stack structure, as a recursive program is merely using the OS's stack to do its work. So if you care about speed (for example when a large number of recursive calls need to be made), avoid it.

However, for some problems, it can be very intuitive to use recursion, making it an ideal choice for quick programming.

But I do agree with elbarto, I think this program could be written recursively.

--- start of function ---
function [out1, out2] = f(x)
function body
""
....

f(out1)
f(out2)

--- end of function ---

[elbarto_87]

I find the concept of recursion quite intriguing with some of the solutions it can yield rather easily. For example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Hanoi

Regards Elbarto

[XCan]

There is nothing wrong with recursion, I didn't mean to imply that. I just meant that it should not always be thought as the solution due to its performance issues. But for small problems, or problems where speed does not matter that much, when you have a choice to save tons of time using a recursive function, of course you should go for it.

[jpkotta]

In octave:

function ret = nest(func, arg, n)
    ret = arg;
    for i = 1:n
        ret = func(ret);
    end
endfunction

nest(@(x) [x,x], 0, 3) % returns the same as zeros(1,2^3)