Chapter 3: Recursion

Question 1

What information can you give me, just based on this call stack?

Answer 1

• The greet function is called first, with name = maggie.
• Then the greet function calls the greet2 function, with

name = maggie.

• At this point, the greet function is in an incomplete,

suspended state.

• The current function call is the greet2 function.
• After this function call completes, the greet function will

resume.

Question 2

Suppose you accidentally write a recursive function that runs

forever. As you saw, your computer allocates memory on the

stack for each function call. What happens to the stack when

your recursive function runs forever?

Answer 2

The stack grows forever. Each program has a limited

amount of space on the call stack. When your program runs

out of space (which it eventually will), it will exit with a stackoverflow

error.