[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

tail recursion



To me, tail call optimization is just one of the many techniques a
Scheme implementation can have.  I see no reason to impose it on all
implementations.

If I had a Scheme implementation running on a Turing machine (or other
machine with more memory (real or virtual) than you can use in a
lifetime) and this implementation did not have what you and I call
tail recursion optimization, could you tell the difference?

If we can't define the term precisely, why not just remove the
`properly tail-recursive' requirement from Scheme and thus leave this
issue to the common sense of the implementor (just like having
negative numbers is up to the implementor!).

Marc