Don't Understand Recursive Function

[muzikman]

Your visualization really helped me a lot; especially with the nested calls. Thank you.

This is the basic structure of your function:

Output:
rec_count(5)
  print 5
  rec_count(4)
  print 5

If we expand all calls like that, we get:

Output:
rec_count(5)
  print 5
  rec_count(4)
    print 4
    rec_count(3)
      print 3
      rec_count(2)
        print 2
        rec_count(1)
          print 1
          rec_count(0)
            print 0
            return 0
            print 0 -- not called because the return ends this call
          print 1
        print 2
      print 3
    print 4
  print 5

Hope that helps.