Simple recursion

Hi,

Recursion is one topic in programming which people don't really understand enough to implement in practice. It remains a very elegant programming construct, though underused.

I am writing this post because i used to think that i know recursion well enough to implement, but when i tried to explain the concept programatically i was unable to convert the theory i knew into the practical i thought i knew.

So i sat down and wrote a code to add all numbers till n, and did it using recursion.

 #include <iostream> 
using namespace std; 
int addTillN(int n); 
int main(int argc,char *argv[]) 
{ 
     int n; 
     cout<<"Please enter the number till which you want the summation\t"; 
     cin>>n; 
     cout<<"the summation is :\t"<<addTillN(n); 
     return 0; 
} 
int addTillN(int n) 
{ 
     static int y=0; 
     if(n>0) 
          y=n+addTillN(n-1); 
     return y; 
} 

The code above is a simple example of elegance of recursion, the other option was using plain old for loop, but isn't it just boring :)

Regards,
Ishan