[apgwoz]

Of course you can, but that's not going to work when you run out of stack space. The point of my stupid benchmark was to write the equivalent ruby code, and then the equivalent C code, forgetting the fact that there's a much more optimal way to do it (e.g. write it in scheme with tail calls).

[apgwoz]

> was to write the equivalent ruby code,

that should have stated "equivalent python code"