Can every recursion be converted into iteration?

Question

A reddit thread brought up an apparently interesting question:

Tail recursive functions can trivially be converted into iterative functions. Other one

Answer 1

In principle it is always possible to remove recursion and replace it with iteration in a language that has infinite state both for data structures and for the call stack. This is a basic consequence of the Church-Turing thesis.

Given an actual programming language, the answer is not as obvious. The problem is that it is quite possible to have a language where the amount of memory that can be allocated in the program is limited but where the amount of call stack that can be used is unbounded (32-bit C where the address of stack variables is not accessible). In this case, recursion is more powerful simply because it has more memory it can use; there is not enough explicitly allocatable memory to emulate the call stack. For a detailed discussion on this, see this discussion.