Tail recursion to while iteration in 2 easy steps

[random832 at fastmail.us]

On Mon, Oct 7, 2013, at 13:15, Alain Ketterlin wrote:
> That's fine. My point was: you can't at the same time have full
> dynamicity *and* procedural optimizations (like tail call opt).
> Everybody should be clear about the trade-off.

Let's be clear about what optimizations we are talking about. Tail call
optimization, itself, doesn't care _what_ is being called. It can just
as easily mean "erase its own stack frame and replace it with that of
another function" as "reassign the arguments and jump to the top of this
function". Some people have introduced the idea of _further_
optimizations, transforming "near" tail recursion (i.e. return self()+1)
into tail recursion, and _that_ depends on knowing the identity of the
function (though arguably that could be accounted for at the cost of
including dead code for the path that assumes it may have been changed),
but tail call optimization itself does not.