Possibly Pythonic Tail Call Optimization (TCO/TRE)

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info>:

> Tail call behaviour is not undefined in Python. There is a strong
> convention (followed by all implementations I know of) to follow the
> reference implementation's (CPython) behaviour, which is not to
> optimize tail calls. But even if an implementation chooses to not
> follow that, it's not *undefined behaviour*. It's just
> implementation-dependent behaviour.

But in Scheme, tail call elimination is mandatory and thus can be relied
on. Unless that promise is made, you can't write code that depends on
it.


Marko