That's all well and nice, but my goal was to use an approach which directly generalizes from the specific case of a two element list. As you'll also notice I used the value returned from the recursive call twice, it's both kind of difficult and beside the point to work on tail recursion here. Noone in their right mind writes a recursive max() outside a functional language anyway, and in a pure functional language I'd just write max( @l ) twice and let the compiler/VM figure out that the result need only be calculated once.

In any case, your new approach is just a variation on what was already posted in the parent node — no need for repetition…