Possibly Pythonic Tail Call Optimization (TCO/TRE)

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 3:43 AM, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
> I don't like the way integer overflows are explicitly undefined in
> modern C.
>
> Similarly, I don't like the way tail call behavior is undefined in
> Python.

Where in the Python spec is it stated that tail call behaviour is
undefined? The behaviour of the 'return' statement is well defined: it
evaluates its expression (or None), *then* removes the top of the call
stack and passes control back to the caller:

https://docs.python.org/3/reference/simple_stmts.html#the-return-statement

This implies that during the evaluation of its expression, the current
function's call stack entry is still present. Tail call behaviour is
therefore well defined: it is identical to any other expression
evaluation, and then the final result is passed back to the caller.

ChrisA