drawing upon itself, referring back.
Used in a Sentence
recursive
Definitions, parts of speech, synonyms, and sentence examples for recursive.
Editorial note
It has its place of course, but gratuitous recursive code that could have been written without gives me pause.
Examples15
Definitions4
Parts of speech1
Quick take
drawing upon itself, referring back.
Meaning at a glance
The clearest senses and uses of recursive gathered in one view.
(mathematics, not comparable) of an expression, each term of which is determined by applying a formula to preceding terms
(computing, not comparable) of a program or function that calls itself
Definitions
Core meanings and parts of speech for recursive.
adjective
drawing upon itself, referring back.
adjective
(mathematics, not comparable) of an expression, each term of which is determined by applying a formula to preceding terms
adjective
(computing, not comparable) of a program or function that calls itself
adjective
(computing theory, not comparable, of a function) which can be computed by a theoretical model of a computer, in a finite amount of time
Example sentences
It has its place of course, but gratuitous recursive code that could have been written without gives me pause.
The precautionary principle is a recursive conundrum that eliminates itself and shouldn't be used in serious conversations.
One possibility is rewriting recursive constructions to imperative loops in a pass prior to trace selection.
Lua's LPeg lets you create simple recursive grammars to solve problems that are often hard with regular expressions (e.g., matching balanced parentheses).
You're right that I was surprised because I hadn't heard of recursive regular expressions in Perl before.
The Y combinator is mostly that, duplicates the function to make recursive, with a functional parameter protocol to pass it to its sibling self.
I wonder what 'explain it to me ELI5' would be called - a reverse recursive acronym?
I now have a non recursive Scheme interpreter and GUI running in browser, able to process the meta tables defining an application.
And since your definition is recursive, define your base case.
Update: I just remembered that extended regular expressions can even recognize recursive languages.
That said, I still fail to recognize recursive patterns far to often.
You cannot split such an interpreter into series of very small and easy to understand steps, it must do everything at once, in a single huge recursive visitor.
Quote examples
If one says that humans have built in brain wiring for "grammar" (Chomsky[2]) to understand nouns, verbs, and recursive clauses...
Sometimes the "manageability" of the axiomatic system - what's technically called "recursive enumerability", and really means that we have a reasonable way of checking what our axioms are - is baked into the very definition of what "an axiomatic system" is.
If we don't specify its utility function correctly (think i Robot: "Don't let humans get hurt" => "imprison humans for their own good") or if we specify it correctly, but it's not stable under recursive self-modification, then we end up with value-misalignment.
Frequently asked questions
Short answers drawn from the clearest meanings and examples for this word.
How do you use recursive in a sentence?
It has its place of course, but gratuitous recursive code that could have been written without gives me pause.
What does recursive mean?
drawing upon itself, referring back.
What part of speech is recursive?
recursive is commonly used as adjective.