Of course you can, but that's not going to work when you run out of stack space. The point of my stupid benchmark was to write the equivalent ruby code, and the

Of course you can, but that's not going to work when you run out of stack space. The point of my stupid benchmark was to write the equivalent ruby code, and then the equivalent C code, forgetting the fact that there's a much more optimal way to do it (e.g. write it in scheme with tail calls).