Re: tail recursion proposal

[ramsdell@linus.mitre.org (John D. Ramsdell)]

I do not believe authors of the R5RS should feel obligated to include
text that discusses the design trade-offs of requiring that all of its
implementations must be properly tail recursive.  We should leave this
task to independent commentators and get on with putting out a
document in a timely fashion.

Kent Pitman <kmp@harlequin.com> writes:

> I think the design trade-off is certainly one made by Scheme but it
> is not the only legitimate such choice, and I would prefer to see
> wording that did not fill the reader's head with Scheme-centric
> propaganda.

I think the language specification should reflect the Scheme way of
thinking and show case one of its best features, the fact that
programmers can easily identify a subset of calls in a program called
tail calls, and rely on the fact that tail calls free the current
activation record before the call.

John