Recursion and Effects

Recursion

In functional programming, we say we prefer recursion over looping to iterate over collections. That’s because looping relies on a state to iterate over a collection, while in recursion, we don’t need to do that. Plus, it fits better with the functional programming guidelines.

A recursive call happens when it’s done inside the scope of the function being called. So basically, it’s a function invoking itself, letting the logic be repeated until it reaches the base case. A well-known challenge in introducing recursion is the calculation of the factorial formula: