How do I print the factorials of 0-30 on a table

Question

public static void main(String[] args) {

    int n = factorial(30);
    int x = 0;
    while (x <= 30) {
        System.out.println(x + " " + n);
        x = x + 1;
    }


    public static int factorial (int n) {   
       if (n == 0) {
             return 1;
        } else {
            return n * factorial (n-1);
        }
    }
} 

I'm trying to print out something like this:

0 1
1 1
2 2
3 6
4 24
...etc, up to 30 (30!)

What I'm getting instead is this:

0 (30!)
1 (30!)
...etc, up to 30

In words, I'm able to create the left column from 0 to 30 but I want to make it print the factorial of the numbers in the right hand column. With my code, it only prints the factorial of 30 in the right-hand column. I want it to print the factorials in order next to their corresponding number. How can I fix my code to do this?

Answer 1

This is pretty simple. Instead of defining a variable, you call the method with the updated x every time:

System.out.println(x + " " + factorial(x));

Note that your loop could be rewritten as a for loop, which is exactly what they're designed for:

for (int x = 0; x < 30; x++) {
    System.out.println(x + " " + factorial(x));
}

Note a couple of things:

1. The x++. It's basically a short form of x = x + 1, though there are some caveats. See this question for more information about that.
2. x is defined in the loop (for (int x = ...) not before it
3. n is never defined or used. Rather than setting a variable that's only used once, I directly used the result of factorial(x).

Note: I'm actually pretty certain that an int will overflow when confronted with 30!. 265252859812191058636308480000000 is a pretty big number. It also overflows long, as it turns out. If you want to handle it properly, use BigInteger:

public BigInteger factorial(int n) {
    if (n == 0) {
        return BigInteger.ONE;
    } else {
        return new BigInteger(n) * factorial(n - 1);
    }
}

Because of BigInteger#toString()'s magic, you don't have to change anything in main to make this work, though I still recommend following the advice above.