I never heard of Scheme! It's the first language that I've heard of that was designed to make recursion practical. Now I'm curious to see if any other language has taken this approach. On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 18:34:21 -0500, rpgoldman at real-time.com <rpgoldman at real-time.com> wrote: > >>>>> "Leif" == Leif Johnson <leif.t.johnson at gmail.com> writes: > >> > >> I remember being forbidden to use any looping constructs in my > >> first semester of computer science. It was a very helpful > >> discipline. > >> > > Leif> Then tell them that they are never ever actually allowed to use > Leif> recursion unless they can prove that the problem can be solved no > Leif> other way. (just contributing to the flame-war.) > > I suppose if you have a compiler that's so dumb it can't rewrite > tail-recursion to iteration, that might be true. (JCTtF-w.) > > Seriously, the Scheme standard demands that this optimization be > performed, so why would you ever avoid tail recursion in Scheme? I > dunno about other languages. I think you pretty much want to avoid it > in C! > > Cheers, > R > _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list