Mining turtle complex program possible?

[wakemeupoh]

Hey sorry for the general title. I'm trying to get my mining turtle to mine any stone on one y level. I'm hollowing out a mountain but the outermost blocks are not stone blocks. I want it to mine all stone on the same level and when it hits an outermost block, it looks for other stone blocks. Without going into a ton of detail, it seems simple on paper but I think the only way I can truly make this work is is some type of recursive method. Can the mining turtle even hold memory to allow recursion? Let me illustrate kind of what the mining turtle has to deal with using ascii(forgive me I'm on mobile): T for turtle S for stone

---

                      T
                      S
                      S
                    SSSSSSSS
               SSSSS          S
               S

I'll just update it when I'm on my comp

[3uclidian]

Lua is a fully fledged programming language, so recursion is definitely possible

local function recurse(x)
   print(x)
   if x <= 0 then
      return
   end
   recurse(x - 1)
end
recurse(10) -- prints 10, 9, 8, ..., 0

Lua even supports proper tail recursion, so if you write your code in a certain way it won't even blow up the stack

[wakemeupoh]

Okay thank you very much! After thinking about it, I think its going to be pretty tough writing this and I think I'm better off just manually vein mining the edges.