In a few languages, Scheme being one of them, there are no built-in iteration constructs.

I think that this is the source of many people fascination with tail recursion. It appeals to the minimalist mentality very much so, (who needs iteration when you have an tail-recursion optimizing compiler). Personally I find such minimalism distateful, which is probably one of the reasons I like Perl.

I have to say that I think iterative solutions tend to have less suprise bugs than recursive. My experience is that recursive solutions often hide hard to find bugs in exceptional cases, but that the same bug in an iterative solution usually results in the algorithm failing completely. So personally I think that reducing recusrion as much as possible is a good thing. I am also perfectly ready to admit that many others who I hold in considerable respect diasgree. :-) I will grant though that as the code scale increases removing recursion becomes more and more difficult.

---
demerphq

_{<Elian> And I do take a kind of perverse pleasure in having an OO assembly language...}