Monday 24 April 2006

Recursion and Trees – Alex Fekken (Fekken IT Services)

In this meeting we will have a “back-to-basics” presentation on recursion and its most important application: implementing tree structures.

We will start with a few basic examples for those unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the idea of recursion. We will then look at the importance of stopping criteria and at why stack overflows are the usual result of badly implemented recursion.

Finally we will go through the process of building a file-system tree and traversing it.

If time permits and people are interested we will have a quick look at Common Table Expressions, the SQL99 way of doing recursive database queries.