Recursion in R

I've been (trying to) learn a little about R, mostly in self-defense because I'm involved in a project with others using it.

R has lots of fun features, such as built-in support for vector and matrix operations and overloading, which make it well-suited to its domain, statistical programming and modeling.

However, there are also some things that are just plain weird, at least from the point of view of programming language design.  Scoping and lazy evaluation interact in a subtle way,  particularly with regard to recursion.

ETA: JavaScript does exactly the same thing. Yech.
ETA2: And Python. Sigh.

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