Factorial algorithms and recursive thoughts

Dec 29 2020, 21:03

Recursion n.: (see recursion). As the joke goes. But that's actually a misnomer, since that would be an ill-founded definition, which is exactly the point where you can't do a recursive definition. I'm not here to analyse that joke, though. I'm here to talk about something else.

Some time ago, I was looking for something, and I couldn't even tell you what, and I came across an algorithm for computing the factorial of a number by recursion. Let's review the standard way recursive algorithm first: