Elf Sternberg

I vigorously disagree. Hard-earned experience is hard-earned for a reason; for teaching purposes, it's not only appropriate but absolutely essential to throw away (or at least sweep under the rug) more advanced ways of doing things. The purpose of this code is not efficiency; it's clarity. Mind you, I think there's a good argument to be made (absent comments or context I don't have) that it falls down on that front too, but I fault it much more for that than I do for not dancing around the particular hoops created by the GC, especially since those hoops may or may not actually exist. (Several JS interpreters, for instance, will cheerfully Do The Right Thing and create hlf on the stack where it belongs)