Re: tail recursion proposal

[Jeff Dalton <jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk>]

> I don't think that "stack debugging" and such are very good at
> justifying a lack of proper tail recursion.  If programs use loops
> where they would otherwise use tail recursion, then "stack debugging"
> won't find a stack to debug either.  

If that's the kind of thinking that results in the tail recursion
requirement, perhaps the entire issue needs to be reconsidered.  ^_^

With optimized tail calls, ordinary tail calls, not used to
implement any loop whatsoever, do not leave proper stack debugging
information.  Loops are not the whole story.

Moreover, Lisp implementations that do not optimize all tail recusions
often handle a subset of cases (in particular, tail self-calls) that
will suffice for straightforward loops.

-- jd