Stack Overflow - Very Deep or Infinite Recursion

Very Deep or Infinite Recursion

The most common cause of stack overflow is excessively deep or infinite recursion. Languages like Scheme, which implement tail-call optimization, allow infinite recursion of a specific sort—tail recursion—to occur without stack overflow. This works because tail-recursion calls do not take up additional stack space.

An example of infinite recursion in C.

int foo { return foo; }

The function foo, when it is invoked, continues to invoke itself, using additional space on the stack each time, until the stack overflows resulting in a segmentation fault.

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