Possibly Pythonic Tail Call Optimization (TCO/TRE)

[Joonas Liik]

On 16 July 2015 at 21:58, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Jul 2015 03:34 am, Joonas Liik wrote:
>
>> Now i admit that it is possible to have infinite recursion but it is
>> also possiblew to have infinite loops. and we don't kill your code
>> after 1000 iterations of a while loop so why should we treat recursion
>> any differently?
>
> Because a while loop which repeats to many times is annoying but harmless,
> but a function that recurses too many times will blow up the stack and
> cause a seg fault, possibly executing arbitrary memory as code. You want
> malware and viruses to take over your system? That's how you get malware
> and viruses to take over your system.

That's just a buggy implementation, there are ways to extend the stack
that nears its capacity, safely.

>
>> Having a user defined maximum stack limit might be a good idea, eg if
>> my stack takes up 100MB its prolly broke, but it should be my duty as
>> a programmer to specify such a limit, not have it inflicted upon me
>> (worse, in a manner that cannot be changed!).
>
> You mean sys.getrecursionlimit() and sys.setrecursionlimit()?
>
... and that buggy implementation means that when you
sys.setrecursionlimit() you will overflow the stack and crash because
the recursion limit is an aritificial safeguard and the underlying c
buffer is not adjusted accordingly or at least so it would seem.

https://docs.python.org/2/library/sys.html#sys.setrecursionlimit
so as per the docs the programmer has no real control over how much
stack his program can have. all you can say is "let me ignore the
safeguard a little longer, i hope i wont crash the program" that is
not the same as "can i please have a stack depth of 20000..

You are giving the programmer a choice between "run out of stack and
crash" and "mutilate interpreter internals and crash or zero out the
hard drive" this is not a real choice..