I feel compelled to note that I was cribbing my observation from a similar one made by Guy Steele, who ran into similar trouble finding a non-trivial example to

I feel compelled to note that I was cribbing my observation from a similar one made by Guy Steele, who ran into similar trouble finding a non-trivial example to justify the necessity of tail calls in an object oriented language [1]: > (someone's criticism): The objection to TCO that you're trying to answer is that it's rarely helpful in the real world. So you have to find real-world examples to refute that. An impractically-slow set isn't a real-world example. > (GLS response): I wish I could fit a real-world example onto a blog page. The best I can do is to exhibit a "toy" example that illustrates the basic idea. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110716163344/http://projectfortress.sun.com/Projects/Community/blog/ObjectOrientedTailRecursion#comment-7 https://web.archive.org/web/20110716163344/http://projectfor...