Question

The following recursive code will cause a stack overflow if the array list is too large. How can you fix this and still retain the recursive pattern?

var list = readHugeList();

var nextListItem = function() {
var item = ();

if (item) {
// process the list item...
nextListItem();
}
};

Answer 1

To fix the stack overflow issue in the recursive code, you can use tail recursion. This allows the compiler or interpreter to optimize the recursive code by reusing the same stack frame for each recursive call, effectively avoiding the stack overflow.

Step-by-step explanation:

To fix the stack overflow issue in the recursive code, you can use tail recursion. In tail recursion, the recursive call is the last operation of the function and there is no pending computation that needs to be done after the recursive call. This allows the compiler or interpreter to optimize the recursive code by reusing the same stack frame for each recursive call, effectively avoiding the stack overflow.

In the given code, you can modify the 'nextListItem' function to utilize tail recursion. Here's an example:

var list = readHugeList();
var nextListItem = function() {
var item = ();
if (item) {
// process the list item...
return nextListItem();
}
};

In this modified code, the recursive call to 'nextListItem' is returned, which makes it tail-recursive. This will help avoid the stack overflow for large array lists.