Python is not bad ;-)

[Cecil Westerhof]

Op Friday 1 May 2015 09:03 CEST schreef Steven D'Aprano:

> On Thu, 30 Apr 2015 09:30 pm, Cecil Westerhof wrote:
>
>> Tail recursion would nice to have also.
>
> People coming from functional languages like Lisp and Haskell often
> say that, but how many recursive algorithms naturally take a
> tail-call form? Not that many.

When I was playing with Scala there where a few cases where tail
recursion made a significant performance boost.

Is some time ago, so I do not remember which.


> I suppose that it would be nice if Python let you optionally use
> tail-call optimization, but that might be tricky in practice.

That is the difference between Scala and Clojure. Scala does it
silently, while by Clojure you have to say you want it. When a chance
breaks tail recursion Scala just compiles, but your code becomes
slower, Clojure does not compile. I prefer the Clojure variant.

-- 
Cecil Westerhof
Senior Software Engineer
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/cecilwesterhof