Hi all, >> 1) Does the Interpretor do any kind of tail call optimisation, I > > No, not at all. > > As far as I can see, this is not easy to implement in an efficient way. > The interpreter would have to detect tail recursion at runtime, which > takes much more than time than simply executing the call/return. Each > function must inspect itself, just to find those (extremely few) cases > of tail recursion. > > Above that, it would violate some basic principles of picoLisp. Trying > to be clever behind the scenes, doing things the programmer did not > explicitly specify, losing simplicity and what-you-see-is-what-you-get. > > Tail recursion is nothing more than a simple loop. So we might better > write directly what we mean, using 'while', 'for', 'loop' etc.
there is a way around not having tail call optimisation even though it is not very intuitive. I just put some code on http://logand.com/picoWiki/trampoline so feel free to comment on it. Thanks, Tomas -- UNSUBSCRIBE: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
