Promoting Python

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 5:30 AM, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com>:
>
>> This is the exact sort of shenanigans that it takes to convert
>> recursion into tail recursion - and in MOST cases, it's very little
>> effort to go from there to explicit while loops. That's why TCE is so
>> infrequently important that it's just not worth the cost - which in
>> this case is damage to tracebacks.
>
> In Python, that is.
>
> In Scheme, you write loops with tail recursion.
>

Yes, in Python. I don't know anything about how you debug code in
Scheme, or what sort of error tracebacks you get, so I can't speak to
the consequences *in Scheme* of TCE. All I know is that infinite
recursion in finite space requires the stack frames to be dropped
completely, which means you can't follow through them in the
traceback. And that's a direction GvR doesn't want Python to go.

ChrisA