Just Splitting Mahjong Tiles Leads to a Massive Flowchart—The Invention of Recursive Functions

When studying programming, you notice something strange.Processes that are extremely complex for humans to think through can ...

Why a Sudoku-solving program looks smart: Recursion, backtracking, and the idea of 'trying from the most likely failure points'

I was thinking about a program to solve Sudoku.You fill a 9x9 grid with numbers from 1 to 9. The same number must not be ...
I Programmer

The Trick Of The Mind - Recursion

While not an algorithm itself, the technique of recursion is used within algorithms – particularly divide-and-conquer algorithms. It is an advanced idea and potentially confusing. The status of ...
Ars Technica

Recursion or while loops: Which is better?

This Q&A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 100+ Q&A sites.
Linux Journal

Book Excerpt: Chapter 6: Functions and Functional Programming

Read an excerpt from the 4th Edition of the book Python Essential Reference by David Beazley. Excerpt from Python Essential Reference, 4th Edition. Substantial programs are broken up into functions ...
MCPmag

Working with Recursive Functions in PowerShell

When working with Active Directory groups, a common requirement is to enumerate all members of several different groups. This is done to typically figure out what kind of permissions each user in that ...
Linux Journal

Working with Functions: Towers of Hanoi

For this article, I thought it would be beneficial to go back to some basics of shell scripting and look at how functions work. Most script writers probably eschew using functions because it's a bit ...