John Machin sjmachin at lexicon.net
Fri Sep 14 18:04:01 EDT 2007

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On Sep 15, 3:06 am, "Terry Reedy" <tjre... at udel.edu> wrote:
>
> There have been languages, for instance, Fortran IV, where local variables
> were part of the function 'object' and which therefore prohibited recursion
> because of the very problem you alluded to in your question.  (My guess is
> the functions had an InUse flag that was checked when the function was
> called.)

No way. Waste of space for instructions to check the flag at the start
and reset it at the end. Waste of CPU time. Divide by zero? Subroutine
calls itself? Drive against the traffic flow on the freeway? Expected
outcome: crash or other unwanted result. Simple: don't do that! Why
bother checking? No self-respecting FORTRAN programmer would want to
use recursion anyway. And mixed case in a variable name? Sheesh.

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