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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