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Recursion vs Iteration

Explore the differences between recursion and iteration in C++ programming. Understand how both methods achieve repetition, their impact on code length, performance, and memory use, and when to apply recursion for clearer code or iteration for efficiency.

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Recursive solution

We can implement a recursive solution iteratively. Let’s write a program to calculate the factorial of a number using a loop. In the iterative solution, we are not calling the same problem with a simpler version; instead, we are using the counter variable and we keep incrementing it until the given condition is true.

C++
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
// Iterative factorial function
int factorial(int n) {
  int fact = 1;
  if (n == 0) {
    fact = 1;
  }
  for (int counter = 1; counter <= n; counter++) {
    fact = fact * counter;
  }
  return fact;
}
// main function
int main() {
  int n = 5;
  int result;
  // Call factorial function in main and store the returned value in result
  result = factorial(n);
  // Prints value of result
  cout << "Factorial of " << n << " = " << result;
  return 0;
}

Differences

The following are the differences between recursion and iteration:

  • In the computer language, iteration ...