4 ms·
This comment was regarding TCO, which Common Lisp (unlike Scheme) doesn't guarantee. Many CL compilers today offer it, but IIRC that was rare in the 1980's.
by ken 8y ago
This comment was regarding TCO, which Common Lisp (unlike Scheme) doesn't guarantee. Many CL compilers today offer it, but IIRC that was rare in the 1980's.
- deckard1 8y agoThere was also a lot of consternation when TCO was formalized as part of R*RS. It's a fundamental part of how Scheme works, so it was obviously necessary. But from a compiler writer point-of-view, it was a rather exotic demand at the time. Though we've moved from a period of languages as defined by a spec to languages defined by implementation. Such as Perl, PHP, Ruby and Python. So what is "normal" has changed a lot.