Comment by mrkeen

3 days ago

Supporting recursion only to a depth of 1000 (or whatever) is equivalent to supporting loops of up to 1000 iterations.

If I put out a language that crashed after 1000 iterations of a loop, I'd welcome the rudeness.

4 comments

mrkeen

Reply
Ar-Curunir  3 days ago

Plenty of languages, including very serious ones like C and Rust, have bounded recursion depth.

  • mrkeen  3 days ago

    Then let me rephrase:

    If every iteration of a while-loop cost you a whole stack frame, then I'd be very rude about that language.

    This works, btw:

      #include <stdio.h>

  long calc_sum(int n, long acc) {
    return n == 0
      ? acc
      : calc_sum(n-1, acc+n);
  }

  int main(void) {
    int iters = 2000000;
    printf("Sum 1...%d = %ld\n", iters, calc_sum(iters, 0));
    return 0;
  }

    • zephen  2 days ago

      > If every iteration of a while-loop cost you a whole stack frame, then I'd be very rude about that language.

      Well, sure, but real programmers know how to do while loops without invoking a function call.