>I've puzzled all day over this. How does one become a programmer by profession without knowing about recursive algorithims?

The same way as a programmer who does know about recursive algorithims.

>If you do not know about recursion then you'll want to read up on it. It's a wonderful tool with a cool factor of about 88, but it has some penalties and gotchas. If you do know...my apologies.

I haven't been programming for long, and I've never needed to use it until now, and even that's only for getting a directory structure, so it can't be that important - but then again, I might be surprised.

Kev