Meaning – The term recursion, refers to the performance of an operation in several steps, with each step using the output of the preceding step.
In computer science, the term recursion is a method of solving a problem where the solution depends on solutions to smaller instances of the same problem. Such problems can generally be solved by iteration, but this needs to identify and index the smaller instances at programming time. Recursion solves such recursive problems by using functions that call themselves from within their own code.
The recursion that contains only a single self-reference is known as single recursion, while a recursion that contains multiple self-references is known as multiple recursion.
Example of usage – “Many computer programs must process or generate an arbitrarily large quantity of data. Recursion is a technique for representing data whose exact size is unknown to the programmer: the programmer can specify this data with a self-referential definition.”
