Power function using recursion

Question

I have to write a power method in Java. It receives two ints and it doesn't matter if they are positive or negative numbers. It should have complexity of O(logN). It also must use recursion. My current code gets two numbers but the result I keep outputting is zero, and I can't figure out why.

import java.util.Scanner;

public class Powers {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        float a;
        float n;
        float res;

        Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);
        System.out.print("Enter int a ");
        a = in.nextFloat();

        System.out.print("Enter int n ");
        n = in.nextFloat();

        res = powers.pow(a, n);

        System.out.print(res);
    }

    public static float pow(float a, float n) {
        float result = 0;

        if (n == 0) {
            return 1;
        } else if (n < 0) {
            result = result * pow(a, n + 1);
        } else if (n > 0) {
            result = result * pow(a, n - 1);
        }

        return result;
    }
}

Answer 1

try this:

    public int powerN(int base, int n) {return n == 0 ? 1 : (n == 1 ? base : base*(powerN(base,n-1)));