tail recursion

[mkatz@garlic.Stanford.EDU (Morris Katz)]

   Maybe the people on this list would not want to use that Scheme, but do
   those people insist on the right to prevent people from calling that
   implementation Scheme? And is that principle worth giving up inroads to
   the mainstream?

I believe that in fact it is important to prevent people who build substandard
implementations from calling them Scheme.  The reality of the real world is
that a single widely distributed, substandard version of Scheme could give the
language a bad name throughout the non-research community for all time.  I
would not want to see Scheme vilified by a group of uninformed people based on
a broken implementation.  I can easily see people complaining, for example,
that scheme lacks flexible enough iteration constructs based on using an
implementation sans proper tail-recursion.  This would completely miss the
point of Scheme, but would still serve to sully its name.

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Morry Katz
katz@cs.stanford.edu
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