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From: Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
Subject: Re: A new module for performing tail-call elimination
Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2015 20:06:57 -0700
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Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> writes:
> My point was that I have yet to see anything that demands TCO and
> can't be algorithmically improved.

I don't think anyone claimed you can't simulate TCO with updateable
variables and a while loop.  TCO just sometimes lets you write some
things in a cleaner (in proponnets' view) style.

> The best so far has been a quicksort that uses TCO to guarantee a
> maximum on stack usage.

I actually thought the state machine example was more convincing.  Doing
that without TCO would have required some kind of explicit control loop
and a messy dispatch mechanism instead of direct chaining from one state
to the next.