Introducing recursion
As Steve continued developing his tower defense game, he found himself struggling with complex nested structures for enemy waves. He called Julia, hoping she might have some insights.
Julia: It sounds like you’re dealing with hierarchical data structures. Have you considered using recursion?
Steve: Recursion? Isn’t that when a function calls itself? It always seemed a bit confusing to me.
Julia: That’s right, but it’s a powerful tool for handling nested structures. Let’s explore how it could help with your game.
Recursion is a programming technique where a function calls itself to solve a problem. It’s like breaking down a task into smaller tasks of the same type. This approach is very useful for tasks that have a repetitive structure, such as navigating through folders and files, working with data structures such as trees, or doing calculations that follow a pattern.
In recursion, there are two main parts...