Surrounded by Boundaries

A bounded recursion is a type of recursive function in which the successive calls to itself have an end. It’s the most common type of recursive function, present in all list-navigation code. Every time a recursive function calls itself, that’s an iteration; every time a bounded recursion iterates, it requires fewer iterations to finish. We’re diminishing the steps to finish the program execution in each iteration, even if we can’t easily predict the total number of iterations.

The number of repetitions of a bounded recursive function is directly associated with the arguments that it receives. We can see how it works by creating a program that sums all integers from 0 up to a parameterized number. For example, if we pass ...

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