My understanding was that tail recursion ( or its optimized implementation )
gives a (properly written) recursive program the efficiency of an
iterative program. Thus it is a very desirable capability to build
into a language which is intended to use a lot of recursive
program structures.
On Fri, 26 Nov 1999, you wrote:
> >Was it Ingo who mentioned that tail recursion had been removed from the
> >current REBOL implementation and asked when it would be returned? That
> >should take care of the stack overflow problem. The problem is a result of
> >an incomplete implementation of REBOL (missing tail recursion) and I don't
> >think it makes a good argument regarding the degree to which REBOL supports
> >functional programming.
> >
> >Elan
>
> If I've comprehended that correctly, a good language should eliminate tail
> recursion and replace it by iteration. This is a feature of most CommonLISP
> systems and Scheme.
>
> After all, recursion is more expensive than iteration and should be avoided
> whenever possible, and its always possible if the function calls are proper
> tail-recursive.
>
> Greetings,
>
> Erich
