Using Recursion to raise a base to its exponent - C++

Question

I simply want to write some code that makes use of recursion of functions to raise a base to its power. I know that recursion is not the most right way to do things in C++,

Answer 1

Here's a version with better complexity (O(lg exponent), instead of O(exponent)), which is conceptually similar to leftroundabout's version.

int raisingTo(int base const, unsigned int const exponent, int scalar = 1)
{
    if (exponent == 0)
        return scalar;

    if (exponent & 1) scalar *= base;
    return raisingTo(base * base, exponent >> 1, scalar);
}

It also uses tail recursion, which generally leads to better optimized machine code.