“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

When you are walking any kind of tree structure, for example

• parsing a grammar using a recursive-descent parser
• walking a DOM tree (e.g. parsed HTML or XML)

also, every toString() method that calls the toString() of the object members can be considered recursive, too. All object serializing algorithms are recursive.