>>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.

Um. Okay. I was just trying to figure out if you might like a reference for algorithms or if you already had references. I guess everyone will have their favorites and will offer good suggestions, too. But, my recommendation would be to read the classic: Knuth. I learned them thru texts in school. Looking on www.bn.com, however, I see there's lots of choices. He's the guru, I guess, though on basic computer science algorithms.

>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.

Yeah. It can be very useful--kinda like having a standard screwdriver in your toolkit. As I mentioned (I think) in my original post, there are trade offs between iterative and recursive solutions so it's helpful to study the two. It's a common decision in applications that do much processing of data. At least, that's been my experience.

FWIW, there are many algorithms I haven't had to use for years and years and would have to go back and relearn if I needed them. Such as hashing routines.