Chapter 4: Recursion & Looping (Review Questions)¶

The questions below assume that you have read the first , second , and the third part of Chapter 4.

Be concise in your answers! Most questions can be answered in one sentence.

Essay Questions¶

Q1: Solving a problem by recursion is not only popular in computer science and math. Name some examples from the fields of business or economics where problems are also solved in a backward fashion!

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Q2: Explain what duck typing means! Why can it cause problems? Why is it not a bug but a feature?

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Q3: What is syntactic sugar?

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Q4: Describe in your own words why the recursive version of fibonacci(), the "Easy at first Glance" example in the chapter, is computationally inefficient! Why does the iterative version of fibonacci(), the "Hard at first Glance" example, run so much faster?

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Q5: What is the conceptual difference between a container and a list?

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Q6: What is a good use case for the for-loop's optional else-clause?

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True / False Questions¶

Motivate your answer with one short sentence!

Q7: When a recursion does not reach the base case, this is an example of the early exit strategy.

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Q8: Any programming language without looping constructs like the for or while statements is not Turing complete.

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Q9: A recursive formulation is the same as a circular one: The terms are synonyms.

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Q10: Formulating a computational problem as a recursion results in an efficient implementation.

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Q11: Whereas a recursion may accidentally result in a never-ending program, while-loops and for-loops are guaranteed to terminate.

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Q12: Before writing any kind of loop, we always need to think about a stopping criterion ahead of time.

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Q13: Container types such as list objects are characterized by their support for being looped over, for example as in:

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