2.2.1 Programming Techniques

Stopping condition/base case

condition that needs to be met to break the cycle of recursion

Advantages of recursion

Save time writing code

Disadvantages of recursion

More significant space requirements, danger of stack overflow, difficult to trace

Advantages of local variable

Ensures subroutines are self-contained, variable name can be recycled in other subroutines

Disadvantages of local variables

Can’t be accessed outside of subroutine

Advantages of global variables

Can be accessed anywhere in the program

Disadvantages of global variables

Require more memory (longer lifespan), can accidentally be overwritten

What is modular programming?

Split large program into small self-contained modules. Makes it easier to divide tasks amongst a team.

passing by value

A method of passing arguments to a function where a copy of the actual data is made, allowing the function to operate on the copy without modifying the original data.

passing by reference

A method of passing arguments to a function where a reference to the actual data is passed, allowing the function to modify the original data directly.

Advantages of splitting into sub-procedures

Procedures can be reused, program can be split amongst programmers, speed up completion time by working on multiple procedures concurrently, easier to test modules than whole code

Advantages of concurrent programming

Processes happening at the same time saves time, another task can be completed while waiting for user input for another

Disadvantages of concurrent processing

On a single core processor only one task is actually being processed at once, if tasks are dependent on each other they may need to be completed in order, trying to do a large number of tasks at once means it takes a long time before any of them are individually completed.