I am new to C++ and I wanted to write a programm that calculates the power of any integer using a recursive non-void function. I came up with the following code which did not work and resulted in an error.

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int power (int n, int p);

int main() {
int num, pow;

cin >> num >> pow;

cout << power(num, pow);
return 0;
}

int power(int n, int p) {
 if（p == 1）｛
  return n;
 }else {
  return n * power(n, p - 1);
 }
}

After some trying around however, I figured out that when I switched p == 1 to p < 2everything worked totally fine.

I assume there is something going wrong when subtracting 1 from p, so that 1 and p have different binary values. I would be so grateful if someone could explain to me why that happens 🙂