[blackflame7000]

Sure there are some problems that lend themselves nicely I already said as much. But in general for an INTERVIEW problem, it as a poor skill to dwell on or even bother testing for since real-world coding is simply not done that way or God forbid what might happen when someone not as capable (but cheaper or younger) has to take over your code base.

[danmg]

We're talking about ACM style search problems that are used for interviews, and not about iterating over an array recursively. For these, the recursive formulation is the naive and inefficient way of solving them.