This page [1] has useful info on it.  Having done a lot of lisp/ocaml
before coming to Haskell I was also very attached to tail recursion;
it took a long time to realise this was wrong.  This topic definitely
needs more prominence on the wiki.

- Joe

[1] http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Stack_overflow


On 18/05/07, Jules Bean <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
A conversation on #haskell just showed that it's quite hard to explain
(at least it is for me) to people attached to tail recursion why that is
a red herring in Haskell.

I had a poke around the wiki and couldn't see a page which explains it
clearly. In fact
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Performance/Accumulating_parameter is
actuall slightly misleading since it suggests that the performance gain
is from the tail recursion whereas really it's from the change from a
function which accumulates an enormous thunk to an function which can do
the work as it goes along.

If someone has the energy and the clarity to explain this clearly and
make a wiki page about it, that would be great. If someone finds an
existing wiki page I'm too unperceptive to notice, even better!

Jules
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