Find limit of recursion

Find limit of recursion
You are encouraged to solve this task according to the task description, using any language you may know.

Find limit of recursion is part of Short Circuit's Console Program Basics selection.

Find the limit of recursion.

Batch File

MUNG.CMD is a commandline tool written in DOS Batch language. It finds the limit of recursion possible using CMD /C.

<lang dos>@echo off set /a c=c+1 echo [Depth %c%] Mung until no good cmd /c mung.cmd echo [Depth %c%] No good set /a c=c-1</lang>

Result (abbreviated):

...
[Depth 259] Mung until no good
[Depth 260] Mung until no good
[Depth 261] Mung until no good
[Depth 261] No good
[Depth 260] No good
[Depth 259] No good
...

If one uses call rather than CMD/C, the call depth is much deeper but ends abruptly and can't be trapped.

<lang dos> @echo off set /a c=c+1 echo [Depth %c%] Mung until no good call mung.cmd echo [Depth %c%] No good set /a c=c-1</lang>

Result (abbreviated):

1240: Mung until no good
1241: Mung until no good
******  B A T C H   R E C U R S I O N  exceeds STACK limits ******
Recursion Count=1240, Stack Usage=90 percent
******       B A T C H   PROCESSING IS   A B O R T E D      ******

Tcl

<lang tcl>proc recur i {

   puts "This is depth [incr i]"
   catch {recur $i}; # Trap error from going too deep

} recur 0</lang> The tail of the execution trace looks like this:

This is depth 995
This is depth 996
This is depth 997
This is depth 998
This is depth 999

Note that the maximum recursion depth is a tunable parameter, as is shown in this program: <lang tcl># Increase the maximum depth interp recursionlimit {} 1000000 proc recur i {

   if {[catch {recur [incr i]}]} {
       # If we failed to recurse, print how far we got

puts "Got to depth $i"

   }

} recur 0</lang> For Tcl 8.5 on this platform, this prints:

Got to depth 6610

At which point it has exhausted the C stack. Tcl 8.6 uses a stackless execution engine, and can go very deep if required:

Got to depth 999999

VBScript

Haven't figured out how to see the depth. And this depth is that of calling the O/S rather than calling within.

<lang vb> 'mung.vbs option explicit

dim c if wscript.arguments.count = 1 then c = wscript.arguments(0) c = c + 1 else c = 0 end if wscript.echo "[Depth",c & "] Mung until no good." CreateObject("WScript.Shell").Run "cscript Mung.vbs " & c, 1, true wscript.echo "[Depth",c & "] no good." </lang>