What do you mean, ancient computers with no stack? My first BASIC interpreter didn't have a stack, and it felt really modern! Well, back then. So I passed arrays around and an index. Worked "fine" even for recursion.

But then I wanted to port my recursive generate-a-christmas-tree algorithm to my little cousin's BASIC interpreter, as a Christmas present, and it wouldn't let me pass the array to the subroutine either. That's when things got a bit difficult ...

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20240401-00/?p=109599