Re: requiring proper tail recursion

[Guy Steele - Sun Microsystems Labs <gls@livia.East.Sun.COM>]

   From: Kent Pitman <kmp@harlequin.com>
   Date: Mon, 2 Jun 97 19:35:25 EDT
   ...
   
   Further, if "well-loved" is going to be used in here [again begging 
   definitional questions that led us to open this set of paragraphs for
   rewording :-], I'm almost tempted to ask the wording be extended to say
   
    "... a widely used and
     well-loved programming idiom in the Scheme language that
     defeats the widely used and well-loved program idiom of stack debugging
     common to other languages."

I like it.  I think this does capture much of the essence of the tradeoff.
Part of what bugs me about other languages is the extent to which reliance
on such debugging tools is relied on implicitly but *not* captured as part
of the language specification.

Maybe we can bring this out explicitly in Scheme, in the form of a procedure
save-me-some-debugging-information, calls to which can be wrapped around
calls that would otherwise be tail calls?

Or is this better left to a metaprogramming/debugging facility?

--Guy