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From: Cecil Westerhof <Cecil@decebal.nl>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
Subject: Re: Throw the cat among the pigeons
Date: Sun, 03 May 2015 17:12:21 +0200
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Op Saturday 2 May 2015 16:20 CEST schreef Cecil Westerhof:

> I am throwing the cat among the pigeons. ;-)
>
> In another thread I mentioned that I liked to have tail recursion in
> Python. To be clear not automatic, but asked for.
>
> Looking at the replies I did hit a nerve. But I still want to
> continue.
>
> Some things are better expressed recursively for the people reading
> the code. But there are two problems with that:
> - You can get out of stack space
> - It is less efficient
>
> Most of the time the first problem is the most important.
>
> When I write factorial (I know it is already written, but I use it
> as an example to show a point), the recursive variant can not be
> called with 1.000 without tail recursion. So for functions that
> could go very deep, tail recursion would be a blessing.
>
> By the way: I think that even if the recursion does not go further
> as 500, it is still a good idea to use tail recursion. Why use stack
> space when it is not necessary?

I pushed the example to GitHub:
    https://github.com/CecilWesterhof/PythonLibrary/blob/master/mathDecebal.py

-- 
Cecil Westerhof
Senior Software Engineer
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/cecilwesterhof