Recursion Clarification

Tell us what’s happening:

I am having trouble with how recursion works in general and specifically in the problem included. I understand that instead of using loops, recursion calls itself to return the value. I just don’t understand how that value is being calculated. This line is where I am confused:

return sum(arr, n - 1) + arr[ n - 1 ];

Parameters for reference: 
console.log(sum([2, 3, 4, 5], 3));

I understand the second half

+ arr[ n - 1 ]
+ arr[3 -1]
+ arr[2]
+ 4

But how is the following evaluated? Why does it equal 2, 3 or cumulatively 5?

sum(arr, n - 1)

Is there something I am missing?

Your code so far


function sum(arr, n) {
// Only change code below this line

if ( n <= 0 ) {
return 0;
} else {
return sum(arr, n - 1) + arr[ n - 1 ]; }

// Only change code above this line
}

console.log(sum([2, 3, 4, 5], 3));

Your browser information:

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.111 Safari/537.36 Edg/86.0.622.61.

Challenge: Replace Loops using Recursion

Link to the challenge:

This image might help. It seems counterintuitive at first, and it will for a while. Basically, it’s going to keep counting down from 3 until it hits zero. Once it hits zero, the conditional states it’s not going to call function sum() again, and instead it’s going to return 0;, thus ending this recursive cycle. Once it has that concrete number, 0, it can go back and “complete” all the other functions waiting for a result, and it ends up adding them together.

Basically, do “x” until “y” happens. “x” just happens to be a function. Once “y” happens, every instance of “x” will get its answer in a cascading fashion.

Keep in mind this image does not represent your problem exactly, but it’s very similar.

Maybe I am missing something but isn’t that image just showing how you would iterate through an If Else loop? How does

sum(arr, n - 1)

iterate? I thought the idea of recursion was to omit looping? Am I wrong?

Edit: I think I get it,

sum(arr, n - 1)

is used the same way that we would use

n < arr.length; 

in a For Loop. It’s used as a way to iterate through all conditions that are truthy and the values for each iteration and evaluated by

 + arr[ n - 1 ]

When it finally iterates down to n === 0, it then sums all of the evaluated data and returns the value. Is that correct? In this example 4 + 3 + 2 + 0 === 9

Yep, you got it. All it’s doing in the lesson and in my example is essentially replacing a loop. Sometimes it can be pretty useful it’s it’s a complex loop, but usually it’s just easier to write a for or while loop.

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Recursion seems a lot more complicated that the other type of loops, how often would you say that you use recursion? Do you know of a good resource that I could use for more information? I have a couple courses on Udemy but I haven’t seen any information on recursion.

I rarely use recursion. A lot of the time it’s the programmer’s choice. For more info just google javascript recursion, eg. There are some examples you can find, but there’s really never a scenario where you always or should use recursion.

This site has a bit more info as well.

Thank you for the assistance.

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