Interview Cake The base case tells a recursive method when to stop. Otherwise it would keep calling itself forever!
For example, we could add all numbers 1 to n recursively like this:
If we input 3 as our n, this method will take 3, then add 2, then add 1, then add 0, then add -1, then add -2, etc forever (or until the program crashes).
We want to stop adding when n gets to 1. We'd say that our "base case" is n <= 1, and our code might look like:
Whenever writing a recursive method, be careful not to forget the base case!
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