This is a well known story. I do take issue with the arrogance of the author: "Of course we cannot blame the Bauer faction for not having the experience of lat

This is a well known story. I do take issue with the arrogance of the author: "Of course we cannot blame the Bauer faction for not having the experience of later workers in the field." Oh _please_! The reality was the the common machines of the time didn't have todays fancy addressing modes. All memory addresses were global addresses. Thus, the _cost_ of making all memory access relative to a stack pointer was far from trivial. Of course, there was a work-around if you could forgo re-entrance (~ "thread-safety"): use static activation records, but saving it to the stack before the recursive call and restoring after. Still not exactly free.