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Recursion vs. Iteration - Coding Throwdown
Multiplication? Schmultiplication!
All programming languages you’re likely to use will include arithmetic operators like +
, -
, and *
.
Let’s pretend Python left out the multiplication, *
, operator.
How could we implement it ourselves? Well, multiplication is repeated addition. We can use a loop!
Here’s an iterative approach:
def multiplication(num_1, num_2): result = 0 for count in range(0, num_2): result += num_1 return result multiplication(3, 7) # 21 multiplication(5, 5) # 25 multiplication(0, 4) # 0
This implementation isn’t quite as robust as the built-in operator. It won’t work with negative numbers, for example. We don’t expect your implementation to handle negative numbers either!
What is the big O runtime of our implementation?
Instructions
1.
Implement your version of multiplication()
which has the same functionality using recursive calls!