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Recursion in Matlab, Freemat, Octave and Scilab

This document discusses recursion in Matlab/Freemat/Octave/Scilab by providing three examples - printing "Hello World" repeatedly, calculating factorials recursively, and computing the Fibonacci sequence recursively. Recursion allows a function to call itself, and is useful in programming. The examples demonstrate both recursion and including stopping conditions to avoid infinite loops.

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rodwellhead
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1K views

Recursion in Matlab, Freemat, Octave and Scilab

This document discusses recursion in Matlab/Freemat/Octave/Scilab by providing three examples - printing "Hello World" repeatedly, calculating factorials recursively, and computing the Fibonacci sequence recursively. Recursion allows a function to call itself, and is useful in programming. The examples demonstrate both recursion and including stopping conditions to avoid infinite loops.

Uploaded by

rodwellhead
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Matlab/Freemat/Octave/Scilab: Recursion
In computer science, recursion1 is the facility which allows a function (i.e. any type of module) to call itself. Recursion is a very useful facility in computer programming and it is available in Matlab/Freemat/Octave/Scilab. In this document three typical examples are used to demonstrate recursion in Matlab/Freemat/Octave/Scilab. In each of the examples the function is placed in an M-file2. Example 1 : Hello World Consider the following function in the file helloworld.m. Note that it is recursive because the function is called helloworld() and it calls helloworld() from within its body.
function helloworld() 'Hello World' helloworld()

When helloworld() is called from the main program the text Hello World is printed continually (actually the computer complains of stack overflow and gives up after a while). As illustrated by the example above, in practice we find that a recursive function should have a stopping condition (if the program is required to complete a process). In the following example, the factorial3 of a number is determined using a recursive method. Example 2: Factorial function function [fact]=factorial(n) if (n==1) fact=1; else fact=n*factorial(n-1); end The method uses the useful relationship:

the factorial is written in terms of the factorial of a smaller number. And the stopping condition is also included.

Recursion Matlab/Freemat/Octave/Octave: Functions: M-files 3 Factorial


1 2

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Example 3: Fibonacci sequence As a third example, we consider a recursive algorithm for computing a term of the Fibonacci sequence4. The Fibonacci sequence is as follows
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ...; It starts 1, 1 then each of the following terms is determined as the sum of the previous two terms.

function [fib]=fibonacci(n) if (n<=2) fib=1; else fib=fibonacci(n-1)+fibonacci(n-2); end The method uses the recurrence relationship:

the Fibonacci number of index n is written in terms of two earlier Fibonacci terms. For example Fibonacci(10) returns the value 55.

Sequences

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