“Necessary” Uses of Recursion in Imperative Languages

Question

I\'ve recently seen in a couple of different places comments along the lines of, \"I learned about recursion in school, but have never used it or felt the need for it since

Answer 1

There are no "necessary" uses of recursion. All recursive algorithms can be converted to iterative ones. I seem to recall a stack being necessary, but I can't recall the exact construction off the top of my head.

Practically speaking, if you're not using recursion for the following (even in imperative languages) you're a little mad:

1. Tree traversal
2. Graphs
3. Lexing/Parsing
4. Sorting