Christopher Smith wrote: > James G. Sack (jim) wrote: >> Hey, I can answer that one! Tail recursion does not fix infinite >> recursion for you. >> > Technically, the recursion limit is not there to catch infinite > recursion, but rather to prevent a stack overflow. >> The problem with your example would occur in any language. >> > No. Some languages would blow their stack. Some languages would run out > of memory. Some languages would decide that there was a case of infinite > recursion and generate an error accordingly. Others might find it very > difficult to detect infinite recursion (kind of like the halting > problem... only not), so they might just hang indefinitely.
I am embarrassed to have missed the point of the original question, and probably to have insulted CS's intelligence in the process. Oops. My only defense is that I guess I was thinking in debugging mode, and didn't really pay attention to the comments. ;-) You guys are way [too?] gentle, though in not telling me I seemed to be off in my own world. Hmm, or maybe I am most of the time? Regards, ..jim -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
