The Joy of Kotlin

4 Recursion, corecursion, and memoization

In this chapter

• Using recursion and corecursion
• Creating recursive functions
• Using corecursive (tail recursive) functions
• Implementing memoization

Recursive functions are a ubiquitous feature in many programming languages, although those are seldom used in Java. That’s because of the poor implementation of this functionality. Fortunately, Kotlin offers a much better implementation, so that you can use recursion widely.

With recursion, many algorithms are defined recursively. Implementing these algorithms in non-recursive languages consists mainly of translating recursive algorithms into non-recursive ones. Using a language capable of handling recursion not only simplifies coding, but also allows writing ...