Why are functions in Ocaml/F# not recursive by default?

The French and British descendants of the original ML made different choices and their choices have been inherited through the decades to the modern variants. So this is just legacy but it does affect idioms in these languages.

One crucial reason for the explicit use of rec is to do with Hindley-Milner type inference, which underlies all staticly typed functional programming languages (albeit changed and extended in various ways).

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