(Robot will take one step down).Ĭheck if robot is at sea level. (it’s easy, you know the height of a single step).Ĭall the function. Write a function that instructs the robot to take 1 step down. You would solve this problem very simply. If you stick to the for loops approach, you can’t program the robot without quizzing me for more info. I only tell you that there’s a robot on top of a flight of stairs who must be brought down to sea level, and that each step is X inches high. Now suppose I don’t tell you the height of the topmost step (where the robot is standing). You can have your code do the math to calculate the number of steps and then have the robot take that many steps before you announce your robot has reached ground level. I give you the following information: height of the highest step and lowest step (as measured from sea level) and the height of each individual step. Let’s say you’re programming a robot to walk down a flight of stairs. Here’s an example off the top of my head: Whereas, recursion lets you simply call a function until your objective is met. That can be a pain depending on how complex your problem is and will often require you to write a lot more code just to be able to define the condition.

As “bials” pointed out, if you want to use a loop instead of recursion, you need to necessarily define a condition that the loop must test and execute. I program in other languages (but not Javascript, hence this class) and recursion is a familiar concept, so I will try and explain it in simpler terms.

You dont know js recursion