Breaking out of a recursion in java

Question

The recursion is sort of a \'divide and conquer\' style, it splits up while getting smaller (Tree data structure), and I want it to break completely if a violation is found,

Answer 1

You could return an error code, or modify some global variable so that each recursive instance knows to "kill itself".

Something of the sort.

int foo(bar){
     int to_the_next;

      if (go_recursive){
            to_the_next = foo(whisky_bar);

            if (to_the_next ==DIE) return DIE;
      }

      if (something_unexpected_happened) return DIE;

      process;//may include some other recursive calls, etc etc
}