[Python-Dev] Proper tail recursion

Fri Jul 16 04:35:24 CEST 2004

> > 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/)