is there ever a time you would not use recursion? [closed]

Answer 1

Algorithms and Data Structures by Niklaus Wirth have a section "When not to use recursion", but recursion is useful programmer`s tool. I think that understanding recursion is "must" for a programmer.

You have a clever approach to permutation problem. It can be solved recursively (pseudocode):

private void PermutationsRecursive(string prefix, string s)
{
    int N = s.Length;

    if (N > 0)
        for (int i = 0; i < N; i++)
            PermutationsRecursive(prefix + s[i], s.Substring(0, i) + s.Substring(i + 1, N - i - 1));
    else
        WriteLine(prefix);
}

PermutationsRecursive("", "carbon");