I was under the impression that recursion carries serious performance penalties, so one should avoid it whenever possible even at the expense of code clarity. Perhaps outside of scientific computing this would be less of an issue, and I'm fairly sure that if you're using something like Lisp...
I've not been able to find any sort of answer to this using google, but perhaps it's because the searches I've used have not been specific enough, so I apologize for bringing it up if this is answered on every LaTeX-oriented website. In any case, here's my setup:
\begin{enumerate}
\item...