I used the debugger to examine this code but not understanding a couple areas.

  1. Why does the for loop repeat after it exits to print a new line? If it exits the loop, shouldn’t it be done with it?
  2. Why is n incremented and not i as stated with i++?

int main(void)
{
    int height = get_int("Height: ");

    draw(height);
}

void draw(int n)
{
    if (n <= 0)
    {
        return;
    }

    draw(n - 1);

    for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
    {
        printf("#");
    }
    printf("\n");
}
  • anton
    5·
    11 months ago

    Recursion is often unintuitive for beginners, to understand this code we should simply it a bit

    
int main(void)
{
    int height = get_int("Height: ");

    draw(height);
}

void draw(int n)
{
    if (n <= 0)
    {
        return;
    }

    draw(n - 1);
    printf("%d",  n);
    
    printf("\n");
}

    Inputting 3 should now give us a output like

    1
2
3

    Try to understand that case first and than muddle it up with the loop.

    If you examine it in a debugger look at the Stack trace. If you use gdb its bt in a visual debugger it’s probably the list of function names next to the variables