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Learning F# Functional Data Structures and Algorithms

You're reading from   Learning F# Functional Data Structures and Algorithms Get started with F# and explore functional programming paradigm with data structures and algorithms

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jun 2015
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781783558476
Length 206 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Author (1):
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Adnan Masood Adnan Masood
Author Profile Icon Adnan Masood
Adnan Masood
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Table of Contents (12) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Embrace the Truth FREE CHAPTER 2. Now Lazily Get Over It, Again 3. What's in the Bag Anyway? 4. Are We There Yet? 5. Let's Stack Up 6. See the Forest for the Trees 7. Jumping the Queue 8. Quick Boost with Graph 9. Sets, Maps, and Vectors of Indirections 10. Where to Go Next? Index

To understand recursion, you must understand recursion


Recursion is an integral part of functional programming. The emphasis on recursive methods in functional programming is mainly due to the reason that you don't need a mutable state, hence making it simple and straightforward to semantically define a term. Due to this prevalence of recursion as a functional construct and its semantic differences from other functional programming languages like Haskell, F# provides a keyword for recursion that is, rec. This is how you define a recursive function:

let rec recursive-function-identifier parameter-list = 
  recursive-function-body

Factorial is usually a simple example to begin explaining how recursion works. To jog your memory, the factorial of n is the product of all the numbers from , that is,

Hence the output will be as follows:

Since F# is a multi-paradigm language, let's first try to solve this using an imperative approach as seen in the next screenshot:

The iterative implementation of a...

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