Hi Thorsten, >>> The notion of 'tail-recursion' does not have any meaning in an >>> interpreted language like PicoLisp, since its only for compiler >>> optimizations -right? >> >> I think you are confusing the terms. What you are probably after is >> called tail call optimisation (TCO), which is an optimisation that can >> be applied to tail calls. > > tail-recursion is definitely one way to name it, there are a lot of > usage examples around, e.g. > > ,-------------------------------------------------- > | http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Tail_recursion > `-------------------------------------------------- > > but TCO might be a more accurate term, or lets put it like this - many > books about compiled languages state that tail-recusrion is important > because it enables TCO.
no, TCO itself is not about recursion. TCO can be applied even to non-recursive code. You could put it the other way round, TCO makes tail-recursive code more space efficient by reusing stack frames instead of growing the stack. Cheers, Tomas -- UNSUBSCRIBE: mailto:[email protected]?subject=Unsubscribe
