Well, I wasn't offering an opinion as to when recursion should be used--merely pointing out that the GP's proposed change didn't hold the same meaning as the or

Well, I wasn't offering an opinion as to when recursion should be used--merely pointing out that the GP's proposed change didn't hold the same meaning as the original. >never unless you happen to have unbounded call stack depth. But, since you mention it, I'd have to disagree with your assertion. It's not just about call stack-depth or artificial limitations. There are plenty of use-cases wherein the search-space-depth itself is naturally bound, but unknown/variable down any particular path (e.g. category hierarchies). And, yes, we can impose reasonable "manual" limitations on still more use-cases to expand this universe even further. Using recursion in these cases is far more elegant than nested loops.