A new module for performing tail-call elimination

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Nobody seemed to notice that I just posted a fairly typical tail call
function:

========================================================================
    def setvalue(self, keyseq, value, offset=0):
        try:
            next = keyseq[offset]
        except IndexError:
            self.value = value
            return
        if next is Node.ANY:
            raise KeyError()
        try:
            child = self.children[next]
        except KeyError:
            self.children[next] = child = Node()
        child.setvalue(keyseq, value, offset + 1)
========================================================================

In the context, the tail call is at least as clear as the corresponding
while/for loop.

In the case of this function, tail call elimination is hardly needed
because the key sequence is probably not all that long (and if it were,
the accompanying lookup function would overflow the stack anyway). At
any rate, it demonstrates how the idiom has its place in Python.


Marko