[jacquesm]

That's a restriction on the environment which has absolutely nothing to do with how readable a certain piece of code is. In fact it argues the opposite: we force you to use a less readable version of your code because the elegant one may be easier to read but it may have negative consequences due to implementation details.

That's a really good trade-off for them but it does not necessarily help readability.

[blackflame7000]

But then your code is not portable because it is now susceptible to arbitrary stack depth changes blowing up your program. None of your arguments make sense when compared with the overwhelmingly superior iterative approach. Recursion is the same as iteration + downsides. I mean seriously name the last time you had a stack overflow and weren't doing recursion? That's an entire class of bug introduced or eliminated by a simple design decision. That's how you write superior code for now and in the future.

You shouldn't have to know about the implementation when writing portable code. If you introduce recursion, you now need to worry about implementation since the machine max stack size is now an issue and you've broken the abstraction. And what exactly did you gain that outweigh's the cons?

[jacquesm]

You are confusing implementation of a language with readability. And I honestly don't remember the last time I had a stack overflow, there is something known as tail-call optimization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_call