The function's environment was owned by the funcdef and re-initialised on every
call, which made a function not re-entrant and cost two silent defects:
DEF DBL(N#) = N# * 2
PRINT DBL(10) + DBL(1) was 4, should be 22
The result was a pointer into the funcdef's own environment, so the second call
overwrote the first before the operator saw it -- both operands became the last
call's answer. Two *different* functions in one expression were fine, which is
most of why it was invisible.
DEF FACT(N#)
IF N# <= 1 THEN RETURN 1
RETURN N# * FACT(N# - 1)
PRINT FACT(5) never returned
The recursive call re-initialised the environment the outer call was still
using, so the loop waiting for control to come back could not see it. No error,
no bound, no diagnostic -- the one place in this interpreter that looped forever
rather than raising.
A call takes an environment from the pool now, exactly as GOSUB does. The result
is copied into a caller-scope scratch before that environment goes back, because
handing back a pointer into the callee is what made two calls collide and would
now be a pointer into a released slot as well. RETURN parks its result on the
*parent* rather than on the environment it is about to release, so nothing reads
a freed slot to find it.
Recursion depth answers to AKBASIC_MAX_ENVIRONMENTS like every other nesting, so
too deep is "Environment pool exhausted" -- a diagnosis where there was none.
akbasic_FunctionDef.environment goes with it, as dead state.
One thing this exposed but did not cause, measured against a stashed build and
recorded rather than fixed: a statement containing a failed multi-line DEF call
still completes and prints a junk value. It is visible more often now only
because runaway recursion reaches it where it used to hang.
tests/language/functions/recursion.bas deliberately does not pin that answer.
Chapter 16 loses its "walk a list with a loop, not a recursive DEF" caveat and
gains the one that is still true: a function cannot take a structure parameter
yet, so it reaches a record by name.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
