[chrisseaton]

> Of course, the recursion among methods in those languages arises in a way that's very similar to passing a callee as a hidden argument. In OO languages, the hidden argument is "self" or "this"!

Self or this allows you to refer to the same object. You don't need to refer to the same object to wind up calling the same method. You could have two different objects that just have the same method. Maybe they share a class, or a mixin, or whatever. So I'm not sure self is relevant here.

[ericbb]

Yes, I think I see your point. If I may put it in my own words, I think you are talking about "dynamic recursive activation" throughout this thread.

I don't mean to disagree with the point you are making! It's a valid point.

However, I would like to emphasize that some languages have syntactic properties that complicate things a bit and I feel that a comment about how things "should" be really ought to be qualified by something like, "in a mainstream Java-like language".

Consider the simply-typed lambda calculus, or Martin-Löf type theory. These languages don't allow general recursion but it's not because they are always poorly implemented!