A Laboratory Course in C++, 5th Edition

Prelab Activities

Review

When a function invokes itself, the call is known as a recursive call. Recursion—the

ability of a function to call itself—is an alternative control structure to repetition

(looping). Rather than use a while statement, do-while statement, or for statement to

execute a segment of code again, the program uses a selection statement (if or switch

statement) to determine whether to repeat the code by calling the function again or to

stop the process.

Each recursive solution has at least two cases: the base case and the general case.

The base case is the one to which we have an answer; the general case expresses the

solution in terms ...