People often talk about accidental infinite recursion, but that seems like a rare mistake. I might have done it twice in a 40 year career? It's much rarer than

People often talk about accidental infinite recursion, but that seems like a rare mistake. I might have done it twice in a 40 year career? It's much rarer than an accidental infinite loop, which (almost) no language tries to protect you against. It doesn't seem worth giving up useful recursion. Python's "solution" requires changing a global, which is an ugly thing for a library that wants to recurse to do.