maximum recursion depth exceeded in comparison

Question

I wrote this piece of code to compute the number of combinations:

def fact(n):
    return 1 if(n == 1) else n * fact(n - 1)

def combinations(n,k):
    retur         


        

Answer 1

You should try to avoid recursion for such a simple function as the factorial of a number. Recursion is really powerful, but sometimes it is overused for no reason.

Here is the code for the iterative version of factorial function:

def fact(n):
    result = 1
    for i in range(2, n + 1):
        result *= i
    return result

Notice what Maxime says in the previous answer, that is exactly the problem you are having: your function doesn't contemplate the factorial of 0.