Python Recursion Depth Exceeded?

Question

I understand the runtime error itself that comes up with a recursive function that doesn't end, but why the errors come up before the depth is exceeded?

I'm just learning Python, and I have written a counting function and taken out the conditional statement that was there before, but now it counts up to 976 before the traceback error, when I know the limit is 1000. Why does the error come up then and not after counting to 1000?

Answer 1

Probably ran out of stack space. Instruct the linker to allocate more stack space. Recommend 10,000 bytes.

Answer 2

I'm guessing that Python has a limit on how deep recursive functions can be called. Each time a function is called, the status of the previous instance and all its variables etc. are pushed on a stack. So if there's a memory limit on the stack, or some word length limit, it would fail before you reach your count. Recursion is not a very efficient way of doing things, except maybe language parsers.

Answer 3

It could be that you're running out of stack space before you hit the recursion limit.

Answer 4

Can you post the code? Prefereably in codepad.org so it doesn't lose formatting.