Functional Programming in Java

Chapter 4. Recursion, corecursion, and memoization

This chapter covers

• Understanding recursion and corecursion
• Working with recursive functions
• Composing a huge number of functions
• Speeding up functions with memoization

The previous chapter introduced powerful methods and functions, but some shouldn’t be used in production because they can overflow the stack and crash the application (or at least the thread in which they’re called). These “dangerous” methods and functions are mainly explicitly recursive, but not always. You’ve seen that composing functions can also overflow the stack, and this can occur even with nonrecursive functions, although this isn’t common.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to turn stack-based functions into heap-based ...