If you send fact(0) it will breack?

Question

In the exaple it use:

int factorial(int n) {
if (n==1) {
return 1;
}
else {
return n * factorial(n-1);
}
}

I think that line of code should break and we need to use a conditional in that case.

Answer 1

It will spew out nonsense, yeah. The numbers will go into the negatives until n is so small that it wraps around (integer overflow) at which point it will become huge, and then n will continue decreasing until it is 1.

You should probably add a "if(n<1)" check, just to catch everything :) For a quick example the code is fine though.

Answer 2

You should use
if(n<=1)
return 1;

Answer 3

you can use:
if(n==0)
return 1;
// this will include '0' as well.

Answer 4

so as I suspected the c++ example in the lesson has a bug

Answer 5

I guess they are not expecting us to find 0!

Answer 6

thats how Bugs happen

Answer 7

very true