Question

• I was told that the following portion of code is deeply recursive. However I don’t understand how – can someone explain?
• If so, what are the associated implications?

Note:

Trivial example

            check:
            # Grab some data held in a file
            while ((ReadFile ()) != 0 ) { 
                    if ((checkSomething ()) != 1) {
                            # value found, check file again
                            next check;
                    } else {
                            blah ($doo, $foo);
                    }
            }

Update:

• Thank you for the correction.

• What are the implications of the following, in terms of memory consumption – this is not recursion as far as I understand and after reviewing other questions:

  sub D {
          ..
  }
  sub C {
          D ();
  }
  sub B {
          C ();
  }
  sub A {
          while (true) {
                  B ();
          }
  }
  

Answer 1

Your second example is also not an example of recursion. That’s just an example of what I would informally call “chained subroutine calls” – I don’t believe there’s a formal term for it. Recursion requires that a subroutine call itself, either directly or through some set of intermediaries.

For example, if subroutine D had a call in it to A, B, or C under certain conditions, that would be recursion.

As for deep call stacks, the answer is it depends on:

• how deep
• how many arguments you’re passing in each one
• how much memory your program can allocate

Each time you call a subroutine, it adds a new frame on the call stack. That frame remains until the subroutine completes. The size of this stack frame depends primarily on the length of your arguments list, plus some fixed overhead.

So in this case, you’d have a stack frame with four elements.

If your call chain gets too deep and each entry has a long list of arguments, you’ll eventually run out of space for the call stack. This is called a Stack Overflow. 🙂