Basic Algorithm Scripting - Factorialize a Number

JavaScript
1

Tell us what’s happening:
this returns 120 which is expeced result, Can someone have a look and let me know what’s wrong with my code. Thanks in advance.

Your code so far

var total = 1;
function factorialize(num) {
   total *= num;
    if(num > 1) {
        factorialize(num-1)
    }
    return total === 0 ? 1 : total;
}

console.log(factorialize(5));

Your browser information:

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/108.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Challenge: Basic Algorithm Scripting - Factorialize a Number

Link to the challenge:

2

What happens if you run it twice?

console.log(factorialize(5));
console.log(factorialize(5));

Be wary of global variables.

3

You’ve chosen to use a recursive algorithm here. Although I don’t think it is a good use of recursion, it is common to solve this recursively as a learning tool.

In recursion, you commonly have a “base case”, when you know you’ve reached the end and start to “unravel” the recursive calls on the call stack. Before you reach that, usually you return a recursive call that is incomplete, that gets put on the call stack.

1 Like
4

Yes, indeed, though can you explain why the challenge passes if you simply remove the console.logs altogether?

5

Right, it could be “fixed” that way, but that does not fix the overall problem.

6

I can “explain” it in that it takes advantage of the test not checking that, by resetting for each test. Ultimately it should not use a global variable. That is bad design on not consistent with how recursion is supposed to work. I can open a can of soup with a screwdriver - it doesn’t mean that I’ve used the tool correctly.

7

This topic was automatically closed 182 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.