]> How about the following policy? Don't place any limit on stack growth The stack, like the heap, should be capable of expanding to fill all available memory. I don't know much about the OS issues involved in stack extension, but some such policy seems preferable to building in a hard limit. Users would then be free to write relatively inefficient and stack-hungry recursive functions, and at least the implementation would do its best to carry recursions as far as possible. The only reason I can see for placing a limit on the stack size is that users become aware of trivially looping recursions more quickly. But this doesn't seem a particularly strong argument. Since I sometimes use non-tail-recursive functions on lists, I often start my OCaml code with the following line: Gc.set { (Gc.get()) with Gc.stack_limit = 16777216 };; (* Up the stack size *) so that my program doesn't die when occasionally dealing with longish lists, while being simple and efficient for the common case of short ones. Of course, if this balance were different, I might use another data structure and/or alternative algorithms. John. ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners