Slashdot Mirror
AP Test's Recursion Examples: An Exercise In Awkwardness
theodp writes "Yet another example of how AP exams are loaded with poor coding practices," quipped Alfred Thompson, referring to a recursive code example that prints the numbers 0 to 6, which was posted to the (closed) AP Computer Science Facebook group. "We are often forced to use code examples that are not ideal coding practice," Thompson notes. "We do that to make things clear and to demonstrate specific concepts in a sort of isolation that we might not normally use. We seem to do that a lot with recursion because the examples that require recursion tend to be fairly complex." So, while asking students to use recursion instead of a loop to print '0123456' serves the purpose of teaching recursion, Thompson opines that it's also a poor example of code practice. "Someone raised on functional programming where recursion is a pretty standard way of doing looping might disagree of course," he adds. "There is a saying that when all you have is a hammer all your problems look like nails. This seems, in a way, to be the case with recursion and loops. If your first tool of choice (or what you have learned first) for iteration is loops you tend not to think of recursion as a solution. Similarly if you start with recursion (as is common with functional programming) you are a lot more likely to look at recursion as a tool for iteration." So, do you tend to embrace or eschew recursion in your programming?
> You never know how deep a directory goes.
On Windows, no more than 130. MAX_PATH is 260, so if directory names are single characters you can have up to 130 of a\b\c\
On Linux, MAX_PATH is typically 4096, so directories can be 2048 deep.
If you're using 16 bytes per level, you know your program won't use more than 16X2048 = 32KB. A maximum 32KB of RAM usage is acceptable on any system running any of the major operating systems.
It wouldn't hurt to check PATH_MAX just to be sure, or put in your own recursion limit of 2048.