Possibly Pythonic Tail Call Optimization (TCO/TRE)

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com>:

> Tail call elimination is necessary to cope with a system of
> programming that has deliberately excluded certain other options (eg
> mutables, in pure functional languages),

Tail call elimination is necessary for the functional programming style.
While Scheme strongly promotes it, functional programming style crops up
in virtually all programming languages nowadays.

> but is not as important in a more fully-featured language.

It is not all that important in Python for idiomatic reasons, not for
some "full-featuredness".

> Scheme needs TCE because of the way you have to write code for Scheme
> to be even capable of executing it; Python doesn't, because you can
> write your code to not need TCE.

You can write Sheme perfectly procedurally, but why would you do that
when you have Python to satisfy your procedural urges?


Marko