Why recursive function in c

In the output, value from 3 to 1 are printed and then 1 to 3 are printed. The memory stack has been shown in below diagram. For basic understanding please read the following articles.

Basic understanding of Recursion. The time complexity of the given program can depend on the function call. What are the disadvantages of recursive programming over iterative programming?

Note that both recursive and iterative programs have the same problem-solving powers, i. The recursive program has greater space requirements than iterative program as all functions will remain in the stack until the base case is reached. It also has greater time requirements because of function calls and returns overhead. What are the advantages of recursive programming over iterative programming? Recursion provides a clean and simple way to write code. Some problems are inherently recursive like tree traversals, Tower of Hanoi , etc.

For such problems, it is preferred to write recursive code. We can write such codes also iteratively with the help of a stack data structure. If you like GeeksforGeeks and would like to contribute, you can also write an article using write.

See your article appearing on the GeeksforGeeks main page and help other Geeks. Please write comments if you find anything incorrect, or you want to share more information about the topic discussed above. Skip to content. Change Language. Related Articles. Table of Contents. Save Article. Improve Article. Like Article. A Python 3 program to. During the next function call, 2 is passed to the sum function.

This process continues until n is equal to 0. When n is equal to 0, the if condition fails and the else part is executed returning the sum of integers ultimately to the main function. Recursion makes program elegant. However, if performance is vital, use loops instead as recursion is usually much slower.

That being said, recursion is an important concept. It is frequently used in data structure and algorithms.

For example, it is common to use recursion in problems such as tree traversal. Course Index Explore Programiz. Popular Tutorials Data Types in C. C for Loop. Arrays in C Programming. Pointers in C. Find roots of a quadratic equation. Print Pyramids and Patterns. Here is the following format in which all the recursive functions can be written:. Recursion in C Recursion in C language is basically the process that describes the action when a function calls a copy of itself in order to work on a smaller problem.

C Programs. C Interview Questions. C String functions. C Math Functions.