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

Try to replace:

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

to:

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

Because if you pass 2 identical numbers, you would try to compute fact(0) (which would call fact(-1) and fact(-2), etc until the maximum recursion depth error).