The Art of Assembly Language, 2nd Edition

5.8 Recursion

Recursion occurs when a procedure calls itself. The following, for example, is a recursive procedure:

procedure Recursive;
begin Recursive;

     Recursive();

end Recursive;

Of course, the CPU will never return from this procedure. Upon entry into Recursive, this procedure will immediately call itself again, and control will never pass to the end of the procedure. In this particular case, runaway recursion results in an infinite loop.^[78]

Like a looping structure, recursion requires a termination condition in order to stop infinite recursion. Recursive could be rewritten with a termination condition as follows:

procedure Recursive;
begin Recursive;

     dec( eax );
     if( @nz ) then

         Recursive();

     endif;

end Recursive;

This modification to the routine ...