Tail Recursion: An Exhaustive Treatment

Posted: May 28th, 2009 | Author: kevin | Filed under: Programming Languages | View Comments

A while back there was quite a dust up over GvR’s comments (here and here) about recursion, tail calls, and TCO.

Joe Marshall (of Google, I think) put together a series of blog posts exploring the topic exhaustively. This is the most thorough and accessible treatment of the topic I’ve seen anywhere.

If you have the time, I highly recommend reading them.

  • I especially like the limited ring for storing part of the trace as the counter argument to GvR's loss of debugging information in the Tail Call Optimized languages (in Part IV)
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