that's basically the argument, thank you! the other person i was debating with was correct to push back on the scope of the generalization! but, in cases where

that's basically the argument, thank you! the other person i was debating with was correct to push back on the scope of the generalization! but, in cases where the choice is actually meaningful towards a push to max performance, (not trivial loops as tail call optimizable recursions, further optimization), iteration is the way. recursions are easy to read, understand and reason about, but they also abstract away an implicit data structure choice where unrelated implementation details can impact overall performance.