Final answer:
The biggest advantage of recursion is its ability to simplify code for divide-and-conquer problems, providing elegance and readability. The biggest disadvantage is the potential for increased memory usage and stack overflow, which may lead to performance issues.
Step-by-step explanation:
Advantages and Disadvantages of Recursion
One of the biggest advantages of using recursion in a program is its ability to simplify the code when dealing with problems that naturally fit into smaller sub-problems, such as tree traversals or solving mathematical sequences. Recursion can make the code more readable and maintainable. However, the biggest disadvantage is that recursion can lead to performance issues such as increased memory usage and stack overflow errors. This is because each recursive call adds a new layer to the stack, which could become quite large.
Strengths of Recursion
- Elegance in problem-solving
- Code readability
- Conciseness
Limits of Recursion
- Increased memory usage
- Risk of stack overflow
- Potential for slower performance compared to iteration