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Discussion on: Typescript Data Structures: Linked List

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matvs profile image
Mateusz Swiatkowski •

Hi Gleb, nice and clear article :)

Could you elaborate on "Recursive functions are a great substitute of while loops for the tasks like traversing when we don't know the size of the list before we start iterating."?

I don't see what prior knowledge of the list size has to do with substituting while loop for a recursive call.

Traverse method could be easily implemented with while loop and it has an advantage of not worrying about exceeding a call stack.

public traverse(): T[] {
    const array: T[] = [];
    let currentNode = this.head;
    while(currentNode) {
        array.push(currentNode.data);
        currentNode = currentNode.next;
    }
    return array;
  }
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Also traverse method is a good candidate for using a technique called "tail recursion", but for JavaScript tail call is currently supported only by Safari/WebKit.

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glebirovich profile image
Gleb Irovich •

Hey Mateusz, thanks for your feedback! Probably, the sentence is not very well structured. What I meant is that in the traverse example we don’t have prior knowledge of the size and therefore we cannot use for loops. However we can use a while loop or alternatively a recursive function.
It’s a great input regarding the call stack overflow 👍👍👍, I definitely missed it out of sight, since I alway tend to be biased toward functional approaches.