title: How to store a certain value when running function multiple times through another function
body: <p>My problem is that I have two functions and one of the functions calls the other and because it does this several of times(rec), i want to save the value im getting in the second function (callled Mergesort in my case). I'm actually sorting a list using Merge Sort, but im interested in knowing the amount of inversions, so I want to return an int, but i dont see how I can store the value, so i can plus all the values together in the end to get the amount of inversions (yes i know there exists a O(n^2) algorithm to find this). I suppose most of u know the MergeSort algorithm so im not going to write it all up, but from the below code u might get an idea of what im looking for. if it doesnt help, then try to answer my question from what i explained above :)</p>
  
  <pre><code>public ArrayList MergeMerge(ArrayList A, int e, int a){
       s=...;
       MergeMerge(A,e,a);
       MergeMerge(A,e-1,a);
       MergeSort(A,e,r,s);
  
  public ArrayList Mergesort (ArrayList A, int e, int a, int s) {
       ...
       int inversions=0;
       for (....)
           ....
           else {
              ...
              inversions=inversions+(s-i);
              }
  </code></pre>