Using a list to synthesize a stack for recursion in Python? Examples?

Question

For instance, this is my factorial function:

def fact(n):
    if n<=1: return 1
    else: return n*fact(n-1)

But it crashes when n is too high. I'd like to emulate this exact same function using a stack emulation. How would I do something like this? What if it's not tail-recursive? Having a hard time finding explanations.

Answer 1

First off, you could make it tail recursive:

def tfact(n,acc=1):
    if n<=1: return acc
    else: return tfact(n-1,acc*n)

But for a more direct translation:

def ifact(n):
    stack = []
    while True:
        if n==1:
            while stack:
                n *= stack.pop()
            break
        else:
            stack.append(n)
            n -= 1
    return n