Bash++ Recursion

In a previous post I introduced the return stack facility for Bash. Now I present an example of how to implement recursion using this facility:

#!/bin/bash
############################################################
# Example script to demonstrate recursion without the
# use of subshells
#
# John Robertson <[e-mail]>
# Initial release: Thu Sep 10 11:58:23 EDT 2020
#

# Halt on error, no globbing, no unbound variables
set -efu

# import return stack tools
source ../bash++

# "static" array of phrases to be assembled into
# a sentence by recurse()
declare -a Phrase_arr=(\
[0]='Now is' \
[1]='the time for' \
[2]='all good' \
[3]='men to come' \
[4]='to the aide of' \
[5]='their country'\
)

# Convenient "constant"
Phrase_arr_sz=${#Phrase_arr[@]}

function recurse ()
#######################################################
# Example recursive function works without subshells
# Arguments:
#   Recursion level
# Returns:
#   contcatenated phrases
#
{
   local lvl=$1

   # Continue recursing until out of phrases
   if (( lvl + 1 < Phrase_arr_sz )); then

      # Call ourself again with incremented lvl
      recurse $(( lvl + 1 ))

      # Pop the result into R1
      RTN_pop R1

      # Push concatenated result on return stack
      RTN_push "${Phrase_arr[$lvl]} $R1"

   else

      # Push final phrase on return stack
      RTN_push "${Phrase_arr[$lvl]}"

   fi
}

###################################
### Execution starts here #########
###################################

# NOTE: We'll reserve R1 R2 R3 ... global
# variables to fetch return values from
# return stack.

# Recursively assemble sentence from Phrase_arr
recurse 0

# Retrieve sentence from return stack
RTN_pop R1

# Print result
echo "Result: '$R1'"

... and the result is:

Result: 'Now is the time for all good men to come to the aide of their country'

All files referenced here are available on Github!