Is there a way to reference the function you are inside of in C?

Question

I am writing a function that just looks up values inside of a table. Is it possible to call that function inside of itself? I've seen stuff about this and self and don't really understand it.

Answer 1

Yes, you can. It's called recursion.

void foo(){
   foo(); //This is legal.
}

Of course you need to return from it to avoid infinite recursive calls. Failing to return will cause a stack overflow. Here's a better example:

void foo(int n){
    if (n == 0)
        return;
    foo(--n);
}

Answer 2

See Recursion (computer science) (Wikipedia).

An example of calling a function inside a function:

# include<stdio.h>

int factorial(unsigned int number)
{
    if (number <= 1)
        return 1;
    return number * factorial(number - 1);
}

void main()
{
    int x = 5;
    printf("factorial of %d is %d",x,factorial(x));
}