what is the best method of tracing this code on paper..

Are you saying the rules are that there is guaranteed to be no trick code in there?

Also, tmp will be at least 1, not at least 8 (all tho it will get at least as high as 6?)

But witness the return value is not used anyway

Code:

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what1(arr,6,5) ;

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meaning the intent is just to process the matrix, but like I said last time, I do not think any changes will be made in this "process".

why they do

Code:

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if (tmp > stam)  stam = tmp;

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??

So I compiled this code and added a function to check the matrix values before and after the function calls:

Code:

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void show (int *ptr[], int r, int c) {
        int i, ii;
        for (i=0; i<r; i++) {
                for (ii=0; ii<c; ii++) printf("%5d",ptr[i][ii]);
                printf("\n");
        }
}

// used this way:
show(arr,6,5);

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And my theory is correct, the matrix is not changed! You know what that means? The whole thing is bogus (what1 and what2 do not do anything).

So why do "they" do this:

Code:

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if (tmp > stam)  stam = tmp;

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Why not? It doesn't matter anyway, the return value is not used for anything.

i was asked what what1 returns
that the whole purpose

Quote:

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Originally Posted by transgalactic2

i was asked what what1 returns
that the whole purpose

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Yuck. I guess you will have to look at that loop containing (!j && !i) and decide how many times what2 gets called, because the return value of what1 would be the highest value from the nested for loop that calls what2 -- which the longest single recursive chain would be 5 or 6, except it looks like it might be called several times on each cell, so may 10, 12, or a bit more...