On Tail Recursion Elimination
There was a bit of a controversial post on Guido van Rossum’s blog that I thought deserved a little comment. To sum up Guido’s argument, he doesn’t feel like implementing Tail Recursion Elimination (henceforth referred to as TRE) in Python because: Stack traces help debug, TRE makes them useless TRE Is Not An Optimization (it creates a class of code that explodes without it) Guido does not subscribe to the “Recursion is the basis of all programming” idea Due to Python’s highly dynamic namespaces, it’s very nontrivial to know if a call is a recursion. The funny thing is that,Read more →