Transparent space requirements (was Re: tail recursion proposal)

[Stephen Adams <adams@martigny.ai.mit.edu>]

 > The issue should be reconsidered as follows: Either make space
 > requirements transparent throughout the language or drop the "proper
 > tail recursiveness" requirement.  But that has been said before by
 > other people, too.

Are you saying that you are happy to rewrite all your
programs to use `DO'?  I don't know about you, but I
maintain 300k lines of Scheme.

My vested interest aside, how difficult is it to make space
requirements transparent?  Has anyone a proposal?

A space requirement would have to have some concept of live
data.  I would advise against anything like the `safe for
space complexity' idea that is thriving in the ML community.
The constrains of this idea make it difficult to write a
simple and efficient interpreter.