A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms in JavaScript, Volume 1

The Base Case

Let’s continue our walk-through of the countdown function. We’ll skip a few steps for brevity…

Step 21: We call countdown(0).

Step 22: We print number (that is, 0) to the console.

Step 23: We call countdown(-1).

Step 24: We print number (that is, -1) to the console.

Uh-oh. As you can see, our solution isn’t perfect, as we’ll end up infinitely printing negative numbers.

To perfect our solution, we need a way to end our countdown at 0 and prevent the recursion from continuing on forever.

We can solve this problem by adding a conditional statement that ensures that if number is currently 0, we don’t call countdown() again:

function countdown(number) {
  console.log(number);

  if (number === 0) {
    return;
  } else {