[plt-scheme] Limiting the damage caused by infinite recursion

> If a student writes an infinitely recursive function and doesn't realize 
> what they've done, their process eats up more and more memory until the 
> whole lab runs out of RAM, we start using virtual memory, and the whole 
> lab grinds to a halt until I can log in and kill the offending process.
>
> Is there any way to set a limit on the number of recursive calls or the 
> amount of memory a function call can consume so that this doesn't 
> happen?

One way to do this might be to take something like engines, and adjust 
them to keep track of recursive calls and stop things from running after a 
certain number of function applications.  Jens Axel Sooegard wrote about 
this a while back:

http://list.cs.brown.edu/pipermail/plt-scheme/2002-September/000620.html


I took Jens's code and made it into a language to provide SICP's 
concurrency primitives:

http://list.cs.brown.edu/pipermail/plt-scheme/2006-December/015850.html


It actually shouldn't be too bad to twist this to do what you want, to 
limit evaluation to a certain number of function applications.