Steve Howell: >two methods with almost identical names, where one function is the public >interface and then another method that does most of the recursion.<
Thanks Guido & Walter both Python and D support nested functions, so in such situations I put the recursive function inside the "public interface" function/method. Recursion is a high-level way to represent certain kinds of algorithms in a short and readable way (when data structures are nested, the most natural algorithms that work on them are recursive). But in Python function calls are slow, the maximum level of nested calls is limited (and it can't grow too much), so this has sometimes forced me to manually convert recursive functions into iterative ones with a stack. This is silly for a supposed high-level language. The bad support for recursivity is one of the few faults of Python. Bye, bearophile -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
