Hi John,
>REBOL gets a stack overflow, yet the obvious
>`imperative' version of the program produces the correct answer.
>
>If you consider a data set of `dozens' or `hundreds' of elements
>to be the limits of `reasonable', then, yes, REBOL does just fine.
>I routinely use datasets of `thousands' or `millions' of elements,
>and I occasionally stray into `billions' of elements, all of
>which are well beyond the limits of REBOL's capacity
>as a functional language, but not as an imperative language.
IMHO this is not a feature but a bug.
Was it Ingo who mentioned that tail recursion had been removed from the
current REBOL implementation and asked when it would be returned? That
should take care of the stack overflow problem. The problem is a result of
an incomplete implementation of REBOL (missing tail recursion) and I don't
think it makes a good argument regarding the degree to which REBOL supports
functional programming.
Elan
