this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
31 points (91.9% liked)
Programming
17483 readers
191 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It is because anyone who has done anything with math (as is the case with cs students), will know how the factorial is defined in math which is also a recursive definition, so the code ends up looking almost exactly like the definition in math, and because of its simplicity, it's excellent to introduce students to the idea of recursion. So, it's a combination of familiarity and simplicity that makes it such a well known example.
Of course, in the real world you would use the implementation from a library. So whether recursion or iteration is better for factorials isn't that important of a question, since you won't be using your solution in a normal situation. The factorial example is supposed to be only used as nothing more than an example.