Best / Most elegant way to unwind a recursive function?

[bowljoman]

I hate stack overflow!

I had to fix a project in which every function returned another function .

function doSomething(){

***
    return otherDoSomething();
}
function otherDoSomething(){
***
    return implDoSomething();
}

A few here and there is effective, but this SOB had 10 and 20 functions stacked up for no good reason. WHats worse, the SOB also had these stacked up on callReturn from a java server.

There was absolutely no way to tell where the errors occurred due to stack overflow. I spent a week unwinding the crud so that 50 million class methods were not called on every time the user sent something to the server. Idiot. When it got so bad that he could no longer debug, he wrapped the entire app in 'try/catch' with a print stack trace.... F'n trace was two pages long and crashed the browser half the time over a stupid null reference! YAAAAARRRRGHHH.... good money though, and awesome company to work for.