Recursion

Pronunciation

• IPA: en, /ɹɪˈkɜː(ɹ)Ê’É™n/
• Rhymes: -en, -ɜː(ɹ)Ê’É™n

Origin

Borrowed from , from recurrō ("run back; return"), from re- ("back, again") + currō ("run").

Noun

1. The act of recurring.
• 1852, William Hastings Macaulay, Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas Chapter XIX, The inhabitants predicate the recursion of these storms by numerous other signs, and are prompt to take every precaution to avoid their effects.
2. (mathematics) The act of defining an object (usually a function) in terms of that object itself.
• 1988, Andrew Radford, Transformational grammar: a first course, However, we have still not achieved our goal of devising a finite set of rules which will generate an infinite set of sentence structures. In order to achieve this goal, we need to allow for the fact that natural languages typically have the property that they allow potentially infinite recursion of particular structures.
3. (programming) The invocation of a procedure from within itself.
   This function uses recursion to compute factorials.
• 2011, Michael T. Goodrich, Data Structures and Algorithms in C++

Derived terms

• crock recursion
• infinite recursion
• tail recursion

Related terms

Further reading

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