What is the difference between iteration and recursion?

Question

What is the difference between iteration and recursion and why/when is one better:

while (true) {
    // Iterating
}

Answer 1

In theory, you can always swap between iteration and recursion. However, at least in case of C/C++/C#/Java, the compiler offers you some support which might make the solution more elegant, especially when you don't know the number of loops before.

The best example is listing all the files inside a folder and it's descendants. If there are several subfolders containg subfolders, normaly in iteration mode you need a stack to save all folders you need to analyze. In case of recursive approach, the stack is already provided by the compiler, and the solution is more elegant.