[cyco130]

As others have pointed out, that's pretty much how things originally started. A more recent example I remember is the Action! programming language for Atari 8-bit computers[1], an Algol descendent for 6502 with static activation frames.

But I don't understand the appeal. Many algorithms and data structures are most naturally expressed with recursion. Not allowing it forces the programmer to create and maintain their own manual stack data structures which brings us to square one in terms of statically-guaranteed upper bound on memory usage since they can grow indefinitely. At best, stack overflow errors will be replaced by array out of bounds errors which is the exact same thing anyway. In fact, it will be even worse: Manual stack implementation will come with its own complexity and source of bugs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action!_(programming_language)