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Wikipedia's discussion of recursion indicates that generatively recursive functions "can often be interpreted as corecursive functions" (emphasis mine) while Wikipedia's discussion of corecursion makes it sound like the two are synonyms when it states "some authors refer to this [corecursion] as generative recursion."

What differentiates generative recursion and corecursion? Are they strict synonyms or are there times where something generatively recursive is not corecursive?

Ben Gribaudo
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  • I can only guess but if corecursion is "dual to recursion" then it too has a vector, a direction to it; it just reverses it, builds more complex structures from simpler ones. in recursion we "go back" to the base case, and in corecursion we go "forward" from it. reading the WP fragment you linked, it seems the "generative" recursion has no specific direction, and wanders around so to speak, like e.g. the collatz sequence. That's my reading of it anyway. – Will Ness May 14 '15 at 16:46

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