I read about a university course where the students had to write C code without using For, While or Goto for loops. Instead they had to use recursion.

Yes it’s bound to be inefficient compared to the looping structure but that’s not the point. For instance for a loop like this:

for (int i=0;i<10;i++) {
   DoSomething(i);
}

It could be done as

void DoSomething(int i) {
   if (i==10) return;
  // Do whatever here
   DoSomething(i+1);
}

DoSomething(0);

The point isn’t to teach you to write inefficient code but to think a bit differently. I’ve used recursion quite extensively in the Slay tutorials code. Here’s an example. It sets a field continent in all adjacent land squares where continent == -1.

void FillIn(int x, int y, int island) {
	if (onMap(x, y)) {
		if (island == map[x][y].island && map[x][y].continent == -1) {
			map[x][y].continent = numContinents;
			allContinents[numContinents].count++;
			FillIn(x - 1, y, island);
			FillIn(x + 1, y, island);
			FillIn(x, y - 1, island);
			FillIn(x, y + 1, island);
			FillIn(x - 1, y - 1, island);
			FillIn(x + 1, y - 1, island);
			FillIn(x + 1, y + 1, island);
			FillIn(x - 1, y + 1, island);
		}
	}
}

The map struct holds not only the terrain type and other information but a continent number. This is set initially to 0.  After the land and seas have been generated, the program picks a random land point on the map (just keep picking a random location until it has land with a continent number of 0).

It then counts by calling itself 8 times. It calls itself recursively at location y,x with directions (y-1,x-1) that’s NorthWest, (y-1,x)  and so on round to West (y,x-1).  But it only does it as long as each of those locations is land type with a continent number of 0. And as it does it, it sets the continent numbers in each location to 1 for the first continent and so on.

This recursive algorithm means that every contiguous land location gets reached. A similar thing is done with seas and lakes but you have to be careful that the stack is large enough.

void FillIn(int x,int y,int locis) {
  if onMap(x,y) {
    if (locis==map[x][y].locis && map[x] 
 [y].continent==UNALLOCATED) { 
      map[x][y].continent=numconts;
      allconts[numconts].count++;
      FillIn(x-1,y,locis);
      FillIn(x+1,y,locis);
      FillIn(x,y-1,locis);
      FillIn(x,y+1,locis);
      FillIn(x-1,y-1,locis);
      FillIn(x+1,y-1,locis);
      FillIn(x+1,y+1,locis);
      FillIn(x-1,y+1,locis);
    }
  }
}

This is used for both land and sea, so locis can be either. It’s an efficient algorithm and quite quick.

Those graphics? They were the initial hexagon graphics…