RECURSION REVISITED 167

5.4 Recursion Revisited

Clojure works very hard to balance the power of functional programming with the reality of the Java Virtual Machine. One example of this is the well-motivated choice of explicit TCO through loop/recur.

But blending the best of two worlds always runs the risk of unpleasant compromises, and it certainly makes sense to ask the question “Does Clojure contain hidden design compromises that, while not obvious on day one, will bite me later?”

This question is never fully answerable for any language, but let’s consider by exploring some more complex recursions. First, we will look at mutual recursion.

A mutual recursion occurs when the recursion bounces between two or more functions. Instead of A calls A calls A, you have A calls B calls C calls A again. As a simple example, you could define my-odd? and my-even? using mutual recursion:

Download examples/functional.clj

(declare my-odd? my-even?)

(defn my-odd? [n] (if (= n 0)

false

(my-even? (dec n))))

(defn my-even? [n] (if (= n 0)

true

(my-odd? (dec n))))

Because my-odd? and my-even? each call the other, you need to create both vars before actually defining the functions. You could do this with def, but the declare macro lets you create both vars (with no initial binding) in a single line of code.

Verify that my-odd? and my-even? work for small values:

(map my-even? (range 10))

(true false true false true false true false true false)

(map my-odd? (range 10))

(false true false true false true false true false true)

my-odd? and my-even? consume stack frames proportional to the size of their argument, so they will fail with large numbers.

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RECURSION REVISITED 168

(my-even? (* 1000 1000 1000))

java.lang.StackOverflowError

This is very similar to the problem that motivated the introduction of recur. But you cannot use recur to fix it, because recur works with selfrecursion, not mutual recursion.

Of course, odd/even can be implemented more efficiently without recursion anyway. Clojure’s implementation uses bit-and (bitwise and) to implement odd? and even?:

; from core.clj

(defn even? [n] (zero? (bit-and n 1))) (defn odd? [n] (not (even? n)))

I picked odd/even for its simplicity. Other recursive problems are not so simple and do not have an elegant nonrecursive solution. We will examine four approaches that you can use to solve such problems:

•Converting to self-recursion

•Trampolining a mutual recursion

•Replacing recursion with laziness

•Shortcutting recursion with memoization

Converting to Self-recursion

Mutual recursion is often a nice way to model separate but related concepts. For example, oddness and evenness are separate concepts but clearly related to one another.

You can convert a mutual recursion to a self-recursion by coming up with a single abstraction that deals with multiple concepts simultaneously. For example, you can think of oddness and evenness in terms of a single concept: parity. Define a parity function that uses recur and returns 0 for even numbers and 1 for odd numbers:

Download examples/functional.clj

(defn parity [n] (loop [n n par 0]

(if (= n 0) par

(recur (dec n) (- 1 par)))))

Test that parity works for small values:

(map parity (range 10))

(0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1)

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RECURSION REVISITED 169

At this point, you can trivially implement my-odd? and my-even? in terms of parity:

Download examples/functional.clj

(defn my-even? [n] (= 0 (parity n))) (defn my-odd? [n] (= 1 (parity n)))

Parity is a straightforward concept. Unfortunately, many mutual recursions will not simplify down into an elegant self-recursion. If you try to convert a mutual recursion into a self-recursion and you find the resulting code to be full of conditional expressions that obfuscate the definition, then do not use this approach.

Trampolining Mutual Recursion

A trampoline is a technique for optimizing mutual recursion. A trampoline is like an after-the-fact recur, imposed by the caller of a function instead of the implementer. Since the caller can call more than one function inside a trampoline, trampolines can optimize mutual recursion.

Clojure’s trampoline function invokes one of your mutually recursive functions:

(trampoline f & partial-args)

If the return value is not a function, then a trampoline works just like calling the function directly. Try trampolining a few simple Clojure functions:

(trampoline list)

()

(trampoline + 1 2)

3

If the return value is a function, then trampoline assumes you want to call it recursively and calls it for you. trampoline manages its own recur, so it will keep calling your function until it stops returning functions.

Back in Section 5.2, Tail Recursion, on page 154, you implemented a tail-fibo function. You saw how the function consumed stack space and replaced the tail recursion with a recur. Now you have another option. You can take the code of tail-fibo and prepare it for trampolining by wrapping the recursive return case inside a function.

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RECURSION REVISITED 170

This requires adding only a single character, the #, to introduce an anonymous function:

Download examples/trampoline.clj

Line 1 ; Example only. Don't write code like this.

-(defn trampoline-fibo [n]

-(let [fib (fn fib [f-2 f-1 current]

-	(let [f (+	f-2 f-1)]
5	(if (= n	current)
-	f
-	#(fib f-1 f (inc current)))))]

-(cond

-(= n 0) 0 10 (= n 1) 1

-:else (fib 0 1 2))))

The only difference between this and the original version of tail-fibo is the initial # on line 7. Try bouncing trampoline-fibo on a trampoline:

(trampoline trampoline-fibo 9)

34

Since trampoline does a recur for you, it can handle large inputs just fine, without throwing a StackOverflowError:

(rem (trampoline trampoline-fibo 1000000) 1000)

875

We have ported tail-fibo to use trampoline in order to compare and contrast trampoline and recur. For self-recursions like trampoline-fibo, trampoline offers no advantage, and you should prefer recur. But with mutual recursion, trampoline comes into its own.

Consider the mutually recursive definition of my-odd? and my-even? which was presented at the beginning of Section 5.4, Recursion Revisited, on page 167. You can convert these broken, stack-consuming implementations to use trampoline using the same approach you used to convert tail-fibo: simply prepend a # to any recursive tail calls:

Download examples/trampoline.clj

Line 1 (declare my-odd? my-even?)

-

-(defn my-odd? [n]

-(if (= n 0)

5 false

-#(my-even? (dec n))))

-

-(defn my-even? [n]

-(if (= n 0)

10 true

- #(my-odd? (dec n))))

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RECURSION REVISITED 171

The only difference from the original implementation is the # wrappers on lines 6 and 11. With this change in place, you can trampoline large values of n without blowing the stack:

(trampoline my-even? 1000000)

true

A trampoline is a special-purpose solution to a specific problem. It requires doctoring your original functions to return a different type to indicate recursion. If one of the other techniques presented here provides a more elegant implementation for a particular recursion, that is great. If not, you will be happy to have trampoline in your box of tools.

Replacing Recursion with Laziness

Of all the techniques for eliminating or optimizing recursion discussed in this chapter, laziness is the one you will probably use most often.

For our example, we will implement the replace function developed by Eugene Wallingford to demonstrate mutual recursion. (See http://www. cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/patterns/recursion.html.)

replace works with an s-list data structure, which is a list that can contain both symbols and lists of symbols. replace takes an s-list, an oldsym, and a newsym and replaces all occurrences of oldsym with newsym. For example, this call to replace replaces all occurrences of b with a:

(replace '((a b) (((b g r) (f r)) c (d e)) b) 'b 'a)

((a a) (((a g r) (f r)) c (d e)) a)

The following is a fairly literal translation of the Scheme implementation from Wallingford’s paper. I have converted from Scheme functions to Clojure functions, changed the name to replace-symbol to avoid collision with Clojure’s replace, and shortened names to better fit the printed page, but I otherwise have preserved the structure of the original:

Download examples/wallingford.clj

; overly-literal port, do not use

(declare replace-symbol replace-symbol-expression)

(defn replace-symbol [coll oldsym newsym] (if (empty? coll)

()

(cons (replace-symbol-expression (first coll) oldsym newsym)

(replace-symbol

(rest coll) oldsym newsym))))

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(defn replace-symbol-expression [symbol-expr oldsym newsym] (if (symbol? symbol-expr)

(if (= symbol-expr oldsym) newsym

symbol-expr)

(replace-symbol symbol-expr oldsym newsym)))

The two functions replace-symbol and replace-symbol-expression are mutually recursive, so a deeply nested structure could blow the stack. To demonstrate the problem, create a deeply-nested function that builds deeply nested lists containing a single bottom element:

Download examples/replace_symbol.clj

(defn deeply-nested [n] (loop [n n

result '(bottom)] (if (= n 0)

result

(recur (dec n) (list result)))))

Try deeply-nested for a few small values of n:

(deeply-nested 5)

((((((bottom))))))

(deeply-nested 25)

(((((((((((((((((((((((((bottom)))))))))))))))))))))))))

Clojure provides a *print-level* that controls how deeply the Clojure printer will go into a nested data structure. Set the *print-level* to a modest value so that the printer doesn’t go crazy trying to print a deeply nested structure. You will see when nesting deeper, the printer simply prints a # and stops:

(set! *print-level* 25)

25

(deeply-nested 5)

((((((bottom))))))

(deeply-nested 25)

(((((((((((((((((((((((((#)))))))))))))))))))))))))

Now, try to use replace-symbol to change bottom to deepest for different levels of nesting. You will see that large levels blow the stack. Depending on your particular JVM implementation, you may need a larger value than the 10000 shown here:

(replace-symbol (deeply-nested 5) 'bottom 'deepest)

((((((deepest))))))

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RECURSION REVISITED 173

(replace-symbol (deeply-nested 10000) 'bottom 'deepest)

java.lang.StackOverflowError

All of the recursive calls to replace-symbol are inside a cons. To break the recursion, all you have to do is wrap the recursion with lazy-seq.

It’s really that simple. You can break a sequence-generating recursion by wrapping it with a lazy-seq. Here’s the improved version. Since the transition to laziness was so simple, I could not resist the temptation to make the function more Clojurish in another way as well:

Download examples/replace_symbol.clj

Line 1 (defn- coll-or-scalar [x & _] (if (coll? x) :collection :scalar))

-(defmulti replace-symbol coll-or-scalar)

-

-(defmethod replace-symbol :collection [coll oldsym newsym]

5 (lazy-seq

-(when (seq coll)

-(cons (replace-symbol (first coll) oldsym newsym)

-(replace-symbol (rest coll) oldsym newsym)))))

-

10 (defmethod replace-symbol :scalar [obj oldsym newsym]

-(if (= obj oldsym) newsym obj))

On line 5, the lazy-seq breaks the recursion, preventing stack overflow on deeply nested structures. The other improvement is on line 2. Rather than have two different functions to deal with symbols and lists, there is a single multimethod replace-symbol with one method for lists and another for symbols. (Multimethods are covered in detail in Chapter 8, Multimethods, on page 244.) This gets rid of an if form and improves readability.

Make sure the improved replace-symbol can handle deep nesting:

(replace-symbol (deeply-nested 10000) 'bottom 'deepest)

(((((((((((((((((((((((((#)))))))))))))))))))))))))

Laziness is a powerful ally. You can often write recursive and even mutually recursive functions and then break the recursion with laziness.

Shortcutting Recursion with Memoization

To demonstrate a more complex mutual recursion, we will look at the Hofstadter Female and Male sequences. The first Hofstadter sequences

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RECURSION REVISITED 174

were described in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid [Hof99]. The Female and Male sequences are defined as follows:8

F(0) = 1; M(0) = 0

F(n) = n - M(F(n-1)), n > 0

M(n) = n - F(M(n-1)), n > 0

This suggests a straightforward definition in Clojure:

Download examples/male_female.clj

; do not use these directly (declare m f)

(defn m [n]

(if (zero? n) 0

(- n (f (m (dec n))))))

(defn f [n]

(if (zero? n) 1

(- n (m (f (dec n))))))

The Clojure definition is easy to read and closely parallels the mathematical definition. However, it performs terribly for large values of n. Each value in the sequence requires calculating two other values from scratch, which in turn requires calculating two other values from scratch. On my MacBook Pro9 it takes more than a minute to calculate

(m 250):

(time (m 250))

"Elapsed time: 78482.038 msecs"

155

Is it possible to preserve the clean, mutually recursive definition and have decent performance? Yes, with a little help from memoization. Memoization trades space for time by caching the results of past calculations. When you call a memoized function, it first checks your input against a map of previous inputs and their outputs. If it finds the input in the map, it can return the output immediately, without having to perform the calculation again.

8.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter_sequence

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Rebind m and f to memoized versions of themselves, using Clojure’s memoize function:

Download examples/memoized_male_female.clj

(def m (memoize m)) (def f (memoize f))

Now Clojure needs to calculate F speedup is enormous. Calculating

and M only once for each n. The (m 250) is thousands of times faster:

(time (m 250))

"Elapsed time: 18.197 msecs"

155

And, of course, once the memoization cache is built, “calculation” of a cached value is almost instantaneous:

(time (m 250))

"Elapsed time: 0.084 msecs"

155

Memoization alone is not enough, however. Memoization shortcuts the recursion only if the memoization cache is already populated. If you start with an empty cache and ask for m or f of a large number, you will blow the stack before the cache can be built:

(m 10000)

java.lang.StackOverflowError

The final trick is to guarantee that the cache is built from the ground up by exposing sequences, instead of functions. Create m-seq and f-seq by mapping m and f over the whole numbers:

Download examples/male_female_seq.clj

(def m-seq (map m (iterate inc 0))) (def f-seq (map f (iterate inc 0)))

Now callers can get M(n) or F(n) by taking the nth value from a sequence:

(nth m-seq 250)

155

The approach is quite fast, even for larger values of n:

(time (nth m-seq 10000)) "Elapsed time: 483.069 msecs"

6180

The approach we have used here is as follows:

• Define a mutually recursive function in a natural way.

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