Python's recursion limit is too high for Mac OS X, where the 
default stack size is 512K. The attached script will never 
trigger a maximum recursion depth exception, it will have 
crashed Python with a segmentation violation before that.

A possible solution is a call to sys.setrecursionlimit() in 
site.py, another is to change the number "1000" in ceval.c 
to a configure-time constant.

Other platforms may also suffer this problem, it may be a 
good idea to add a test_stackoverflow.

I'm willing to do the work involved, but I'd like some 
feedback first.

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I'd like to see a per-platform recusion limit, because the
limit could be much higher on Linux and Windows than 1000.

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If more work is put into recursion limits, I think platform
mechanisms should be used where available. For example,
there might be ways to find out, at run-time, what the stack
consumption is, and what the stack availalability is, and
compute a recursion limit from that.

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A runtime mechanism is already available (PyOS_CheckStack), 
but it is only used on platforms where a stack overrun would be 
disastrous (i.e. run into your heap in stead of giving a SEGV), 
because it is pretty expensive. If there is a common way to do 
this easier (i.e. set a red zone pointer and do one pointer 
compare in a stack test macro) I would be all for it, bt I don't 
know how to do this.

This problem seems to have been fixed.  The
submitted test case yields maximum recursion
depth exceeded on both 2.5 and 2.6a0.