This is interesting you say this (and very timely), because in a C++ data structures course I'm taking, we're creating recursive box trace diagrams. Even in tail-recursive functions, we draw it such that the stack keeps on growing. So I'm curious if we draw it this way because:
1. you can never count on compilers besides Scheme being tail-recursive, or 2. the professor is just trying to make it simpler for all the students. Gene wrote: > There is a lot of work on this in the literature on functional > languages, where rewriting recursions can lead to aymptotic speedups. > Often the idea is to get from a general recursion to tail recursion in > order to avoid stack growth and value copying.
