Breaking out of a recursion in java

java, recursion

Solution

You could return an error code, or modify some global variable so that each recursive instance knows to "kill itself".

Something of the sort.

int foo(bar){
     int to_the_next;

      if (go_recursive){
            to_the_next = foo(whisky_bar);

            if (to_the_next ==DIE) return DIE;
      }

      if (something_unexpected_happened) return DIE;

      process;//may include some other recursive calls, etc etc
}

Problem

The recursion is sort of a 'divide and conquer' style, it splits up while getting smaller (Tree data structure), and I want it to break completely if a violation is found, meaning break all the recursive paths, and return true. Is this possible?

Original source