Tail recursion to while iteration in 2 easy steps

[Mark Janssen]

> Only that you've got a consistent, stable (and therefore,
> formalizable) translation from your language to the machine.  That's
> all.  Everything else is magic.  Do you know that the Warren
> Abstraction Engine used to power the predicate logic in Prolog into
> machien code for a VonNeumann machine is so complex, no one has
> understood it (or perhaps even verified it)?

Sorry, I mean the Warren Abstraction Machine (or WAM).  I refer you to
www.cvc.uab.es/shared/teach/a25002/wambook.pdf.

Now, one can easily argue that I've gone too far to say "no one has
understood it" (obviously), so it's very little tongue-in-cheek, but
really, when one tries to pretend that one model of computation can be
substituted for another (arguing *for* the Church-Turing thesis), they
are getting into troubling territory (it is only a thesis,
remember)....

-- 
MarkJ
Tacoma, Washington