How to get the sum of a list of numbers with recursion?

I think it is a little nicer without explicitly checking the length:

def getSum(piece):
    return piece[0] + getSum(piece[1:]) if piece else 0

Demo:

>>> getSum([1, 2, 3, 4, 5])
15

You don't need to loop. Recursion will do that for you.

def getSum(piece):
    if len(piece)==0:
        return 0
    else:
        return piece[0] + getSum(piece[1:]) 
print getSum([1, 3, 4, 2, 5])

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