On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 7:56 PM, Tracy Harms <[email protected]> wrote:
> Thank you for confirming what I had initially understood to be the > case, that (to date) J has not exploited tail recursion. My confidence > is bolstered that J therefore stands as disproof of the idea, common > in some circles, that in order to be a "serious" "functional" language > a programming language must implement tail recursion optimization. > J has loop construct and is not pure so not having TCO is not much an issue as there are alternatives. For a functional language that is pure like Haskell, no TCO may make certain algorithm very difficult to implement if not impossible. That said, I seldom use recursion in Haskell but most likely some form of foldl or foldr. This is also the case I found in Python or F#. So if by 'serious' you mean coding in 'pure' style(i.e. no fallback to loop), I am curious to know how can one implement algorithms that needs recursion in J. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
