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Looking for a little advice with implementing recursion.I have to say up front that I am not a big fan of recursive function calls. I have created them only about 10 times in 35 years of professional computer programming. My plan was to not allow recursion in my language but I have come to realize that some algorithms are best described in this manner. In C, recursion is implemented by putting all local variables and the return address on the stack. This causes a few problems for me in that if you don't stop the recursion then you blow up the stack. The number of local variables and the stack size determine when the dreaded "stack overflow" occurs which is not acceptable in my system as it must recover from all errors and continue to run. You also have to make sure your function unwinds the stack before you can exit and errors at arbitrary stack levels cause even more headaches. I am well aware of optimizations for tail recursion which turns recursive syntax into just an internal loop but my problem is actually with implementing real recursion. My functions are implemented as rows of a table where calling a function is done by stacking the calling row. Each function includes a symbol table so there is more setup for a function than in C. All my function code is always reentrant so subsequent calls are quite quick. Once setup, these functions stick around until they timeout. Putting hundreds or thousands of copies of these functions in my function table or allowing a recursive function to jeopardize my call stack is not an option for me. A recursive call is a combination of stacked variables and a return address. I would be interested if anyone here has seen a simple language syntax that implements this functionality without actually using a function call. I would also like to have the programmer be able to directly test the level of the stack in their algorithm. Stack lists are an elementary variable in my language as are Maps that can contain any number of any type of variable. I could push a Map and a return address on a stack, for instance. By Clarkd at 2013-02-07 20:29 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 12222 reads
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