[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!