Java factorial recursion explained Notice how the recursive Java factorial function does not need an iterative loop. Instead, the code repeatedly calls itself until a stop condition is met. In this ...

Recursion is (in many, but not all) languages slightly slower, and it does have some dangers (smashing the stack), but used properly it's a completely legitimate, valuable tool for production code.

Curiously, many Java programmers I've met don't know of this since obviously they never applied recursion beyond say the introductory Fibonacci function and they never fed it a very big value, say ...