While implementing a recursive function, it often happens that we must resort to a separate ''helper function'' to handle the actual recursion.
This is usually the case when directly calling the current function would waste too many resources (stack space, execution time), causing unwanted side-effects, and/or the function doesn't have the right arguments and/or return values.
So we end up inventing some silly name like '''foo2''' or '''foo_helper'''. I have always found it painful to come up with a proper name, and see some disadvantages:
Some languages allow you to embed recursion directly in-place. This might work via a label, a local ''gosub'' instruction, or some special keyword.
If possible, demonstrate this by writing the recursive version of the fibonacci function (see [[Fibonacci sequence]]) which checks for a negative argument before doing the actual recursion.