[Python-Dev] Proper tail recursion

[Guido van Rossum]

> > Still -1.  I was understating my case: I find the "recursion is
> > the basis of everything" attitude harmful.
> 
> How can you then still implement ceval.c in a recursive fashion,
> since ceval is the "basis of everything" ???
> 
> In that sense, I'd like to discuss the "the Python interpreter
> implementaton is harmful" issue.
> 
> But why should I bother. You have already reached more than you
> thought to reach with your language, so why should I care about
> reaching you?  You probably wont even consider, so I don't even try,
> again.

Oh Christian, did you have a bad day again?

I didn't say "all recursion is evil".  For a language interpreter
recursion is perfect.

My dig was at the Schemers who would rather implement an array as a
linked list and then optimize tail-recursion in the hope of getting
some performance back -- in vain because they still can't get O(1)
indexing.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)