> You have no way of knowing how much stack space you have. Nobody writing
> reliable code wants to recurse for each level of a tree without knowing
> how deep the tree is.

Nobody writes recursive code? IN WHICH UNIVERSE??

I'm also loving the way you say "you don't know how big the stack is", 
and immediately follow that with "you should check how deep the tree 
is". But if you don't know how big the stack is, you STILL don't know if 
you can do it. :-P

Besides, it's not like there's an /alternative/ to recursion.

>> Nobody designs hardware like that any more. Haven't done for decades. :-P
>
> So? They're still special areas of memory built into the CPU. Just
> because you can't address them using normal addressing modes any more
> doesn't mean they're not memory.

Well, to be /technical/ about it, the entire concept of "memory" is a 
fiction. It would be more accurate to say that there is a large topology 
of transistors connected together - but that's not a very useful way to 
think about it.

>> So you're telling me that the de facto calling convention that all
>> software
>> always uses is "undefined"?
>
> Implementation-specific, yes. How could you define it in a standard when
> you don't even know what architecture you're compiling for?

Amazing. So the one calling convention that every piece of software 
supports isn't actually defined at all. That's impressive, right there.

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