Wentworth Institute of Technology
Division of Professional and Continuing Studies
COMP380 Section 71 - Data Structures I - Spring, 2007
Homework 5 – Recursion
Instructor: Bob Goldstein (617) 912-2512
bob.goldstein@schepens.harvard.edu
http://home.comcast.net/~goldsteinr/Courses/index.html
http://goldstein.eri.harvard.edu/courses/index.html
http://myweb.wit.edu/goldsteinr/Courses/index.html
Due Date: February 27,2007
Hand In: Printout of program code and dialogue of how it runs.
Purpose:
Purpose: Practice Recursion
(This is problem E3 on Page 121 of Kruse, Tondo and Leung)
Ackermann's function, defined as follows, is a standard device to determine how well recursion is
implemented on a computer.
A(0,n) = n+1 for n
0
A(m,0) = A(m-1,1) for m>0
A(m,n) = A(m-1, A(m,n-1)) for m>0 and n>0
Write a program to implement this function and test it for the following values of m and n.
A(0,0) A(0,9) A(1,8) A(2,2) A(2,0)
A(2,3) A(3,2) A(4,2) A(4,3) A(4,0)
NOTE – A(4,2), A(4,3) and A(4,0) WILL GIVE TROUBLE. THEY MIGHT CAUSE YOUR
COMPUTER TO HANG. If this occurs, please hand in the rest and state in your homework what
happened with these cases.
Extra Credit:
Put a static variable into your program to count the number of times the function is called.
As well as printing the value of the function, print out the number of times the function called
itself to do the calculation
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