Definitely agree on the "oversold". I notice you said "half the problem" at the end of your third paragraph there. I'm assuming the other half is that it seems

Definitely agree on the "oversold". I notice you said "half the problem" at the end of your third paragraph there. I'm assuming the other half is that it seems foolish to save the return address for a recurse. Only the first call should save a return. I think one problem with compiler writers is that oddly they don't separate how to treat a procedure and its recursions as different cases. They just fit every procedure into the same bucket-list algorithm of 1. allocate frames 2. allocate return address.