Maximum recursion depth in python

[Christian Tismer]

Ruud de Rooij wrote:
> 
> aahz at panix.com (Aahz Maruch) writes:
> 
> > I believe that
> > Stackless Python has no recursion limits.
> 
> Of course it has.  The recursion depth is necessarily limited by the
> amount of memory available.

Yes. Limited by available memory is the usually auto-applied
substitution macro when one reads "no limits".

Of course you might argue that the size of the C stack is also
just an arbitrary thing that could be made as large as you want,
but that's not so practical.

Aside, recursion can be completely unlimited if keeping the
program state can be done with a finite amount of memory.
To be able to do this, your program must be re-written
using tail-recursion, and the number of continuations
to be kept must be finite. This is not always possible,
also we don't have tail recursion in Python yet.
(but I believe it is possible, to some extent).

ciao - chris

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