CHAPTER 5 FROM RECURSION TO ITERATORS
We’ve already seen that iterators are useful when a source of data is prepared to deliver more data than we want, or when it takes a long time to come up with each data item and we don’t want to waste time by computing more of them than we need to.
Both conditions occur frequently in conjunction with recursive functions. Recursive functions are often used for searching large, hierarchical spaces for solutions to some specification. If solutions are common, the space will contain more of them than we want to use; if solutions are rare, they will take a long time to find. In either case, we don’t want our program to have to populate an array with all the possible solutions before it can continue, and it is ...
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