Is this an example of tail recursion?

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Wed Aug 5 11:54:41 EDT 2015


On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 1:37 AM,  <jennyfurtado2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry I am missing a subtle point: Isnt 1+ self.soldiersVsDefenders... ending up calling 1.__add__(self.soldiersVsDefenders...)?

I think his point is that it is, in effect, doing that; but honestly,
calling this a tail call into the int+int addition function is pretty
pointless. I mean, sure, it's technically a sort of tail call, but
it's definitely not tail recursion, and it's such a trivial operation
(adding one to a probably-small number) that it's hardly even worth
mentioning. The main point of tail recursion is how it interacts with
the self-call, and that's not the tail call here.

ChrisA



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