Hello Everyone,

Please treat this as a low priority, academic question.

I would like to think of templates as equivalent to a function/ method
in other programming languages for the purpose of this post.

I was reading on recursive functions, and learned that each function
call's data is stored in a stack frame , and at the end of the last
function call, the data of each function call is poped out of the
stack frame and returned in reverse order --- LIFO.

If a stack is used then, it poses memory constraints when stack frames
run out, this is why it is important to have a termination condition.
And when there's a termination condition it is not infinite recursion.

In case of XSLT the termination condition is the depth of an XML
structure (it cannot be infinite),  or it could be a constraint
specified by the author of the XSLT stylesheet.

I made a naive attempt to calculate the factorial of a given number
recursively with XSL templates, but soon realized that there's no
return statement.

Any thoughts on whether the memory is allocated in terms of Stack with
recursive template/ or recursive XLST functions is appreciated.

Cheers,
-- Abel