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Recursivity: N! N! N (n-1) (n-2) (n-3) ... 1 5! 5! 5 4 3 2 1 120

Recursivity is the property of functions calling themselves. It is useful for sorting elements and calculating factorials, where the factorial of a number is that number multiplied by the factorial of the number minus one. For example, 5! is 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1 = 120. A recursive C++ function to calculate factorials works by having the function call itself with decreasing arguments, stopping when it reaches 1 to return the final value and avoid an infinite recursive loop.

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19 views1 page

Recursivity: N! N! N (n-1) (n-2) (n-3) ... 1 5! 5! 5 4 3 2 1 120

Recursivity is the property of functions calling themselves. It is useful for sorting elements and calculating factorials, where the factorial of a number is that number multiplied by the factorial of the number minus one. For example, 5! is 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1 = 120. A recursive C++ function to calculate factorials works by having the function call itself with decreasing arguments, stopping when it reaches 1 to return the final value and avoid an infinite recursive loop.

Uploaded by

icul1
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
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Recursivity

Recursivity is the property that functions have to be called by themselves. It is useful for some
tasks, such as sorting elements, or calculating the factorial of numbers. For example, in order to
obtain the factorial of a number (n!) the mathematical formula would be:

n! = n * (n-1) * (n-2) * (n-3) ... * 1
More concretely, 5! (factorial of 5) would be:

5! = 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1 = 120
And a recursive function to calculate this in C++ could be:
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// factorial calculator
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

long factorial (long a)
{
if (a > 1)
return (a * factorial (a-1));
else
return 1;
}

int main ()
{
long number = 9;
cout << number << "! = " << factorial
(number);
return 0;
}
9! = 362880


Notice how in function factorial we included a call to itself, but only if the argument passed was
greater than 1, since, otherwise, the function would perform an infinite recursive loop, in which
once it arrived to 0, it would continue multiplying by all the negative numbers (probably
provoking a stack overflow at some point during runtime).

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