[eschneider]

The lack of recursion was not a practical limitation on the Atari. Base systems were 16K and you really didn't have space for recursion. And the license fee for the runtime didn't feel that painful compared to the other options.

[NetMageSCW]

I think a bigger problem for recursion support is the 6502 being limited to a 256 byte stack by its 8-bit stack pointer.