> Deforming programs so they are ‘iterative’ in order that they do not run out of the stack we imagine to be so costly is ridiculous: if you have a program whic

> Deforming programs so they are ‘iterative’ in order that they do not run out of the stack we imagine to be so costly is ridiculous: if you have a program which is inherently recursive, let it be recursive. Yes! Unless of course your language (or compiler, or interpreter of it) has disabilities and it is realistic, that you run into issues with recursion. Oh well ... sigh > [...] The ‘iterative’ versions just use an explicitly-maintained stack rather than the implicit stack provided by the language. That makes sense only if stack space is very small compared to the heap and must therefore be conserved. And, well, for many systems that’s true. But it is small only because we have administratively decided it should be small: the stack is just memory. If there is plenty of memory for the heap, there is plenty for the stack.