And you'll find in the end that recursion is a feature of a language, it allows you to map some very obvious concepts like the phonebook tearing in half and half and half and half to actual code without it using some arbitrary human contrived framework like a for loop or a while loop which are much more stilted mechanisms.

最后你会发现递归是某种语言的一种特征,你可以用它将一些非常明显的思想,比如将电话簿划分为一半又一半,映射为实际代码，而不必使用那些人为框架,像for循环，while循环之类的,那是很呆板的机制。

哈佛公开课 - 计算机科学课程节选