Either way, if you get the terminal condition of a recursive function wrong, you will blow the stack.
Not in Common Lisp. The last time I tried to show someone how well recursion worked in a typical Common Lisp implementation, I crashed Firefox trying to paste the result of a naive factorial function into a text buffer. Stack depth limits in other languages are often arbitrary.
I suppose what I ought to have said is that very few programming languages can completely protect you from your own logic errors. It was not hard for Giles to discover the error in his code, but he still blamed the language for it.
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Either way, if you get the terminal condition of a recursive function wrong, you will blow the stack.
Not in Common Lisp. The last time I tried to show someone how well recursion worked in a typical Common Lisp implementation, I crashed Firefox trying to paste the result of a naive factorial function into a text buffer. Stack depth limits in other languages are often arbitrary.
I suppose what I ought to have said is that very few programming languages can completely protect you from your own logic errors. It was not hard for Giles to discover the error in his code, but he still blamed the language for it.