AFAICS what emacs calls "recursive delete" is what the ordinary person
would simply call "delete". Presumably the non-recursive delete is
called simply "delete" but is actually something more complicated than
delete, and you're supposed to know what that is.
The "non-recursive delete" would be simply calling the rmdir() system
call, which of course fails if the directory is non-empty. One has to
empty the directory of its contents, if any, first. That, of course,
involves potentially recursively removing any subdirectories, in exactly
the same way.
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