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I personally take the opposite approach. Tail recursion fixes the stack problem and just about any problem that can be solved recursively can be reworked to be

by norir 2y ago

I personally take the opposite approach. Tail recursion fixes the stack problem and just about any problem that can be solved recursively can be reworked to be made tail recursive. Using tail recursion instead of loops forces you to name the procedure, which is helpful documentation. Also, unlike a loop, you have to explicitly call back into it. For me, the edge cases are usually clearer with tail recursion and I find it harder to write infinite loops using tail recursion. Regular non tail recursion can be fine in many cases so long as the recursion depth is limited. I have tested code that made at least 50000 recursive calls before blowing the stack. In many cases, you can just assume that won't happen or you can rewrite the function in a tail recursive way by adding additional parameters to the function with a slight loss of elegance to the code.

jancsika 2y ago
> Tail recursion fixes the stack problem and just about any problem that can be solved recursively can be reworked to be made tail recursive. To cover all cases, I feel like there needs to be a cross-platform drop-in library to properly blow the stack in languages which feature tail call recursion. :)
evujumenuk 2y ago
In my younger years, I used to employ the Y combinator as a way to avoid naming recursive functions because I didn't want to necessarily dignify single-use code by abstracting it into a named function that I'd never call anywhere else. Instead of calling itself in the non-base case, the anonymous lambda simply calls a first-class function passed into it, with the necessary plumbing abstracted into the generic combinator. Fixed-point combinators can be made to work with tail recursion, so I don't think tail recursion forces anyone to name anything. Certainly, how easy it is to go with this particular approach depends a lot on the semantics of your chosen (or imposed) programming language.

by norir 2y ago

jancsika 2y ago

> Tail recursion fixes the stack problem and just about any problem that can be solved recursively can be reworked to be made tail recursive. To cover all cases, I feel like there needs to be a cross-platform drop-in library to properly blow the stack in languages which feature tail call recursion. :)

evujumenuk 2y ago

In my younger years, I used to employ the Y combinator as a way to avoid naming recursive functions because I didn't want to necessarily dignify single-use code by abstracting it into a named function that I'd never call anywhere else. Instead of calling itself in the non-base case, the anonymous lambda simply calls a first-class function passed into it, with the necessary plumbing abstracted into the generic combinator. Fixed-point combinators can be made to work with tail recursion, so I don't think tail recursion forces anyone to name anything. Certainly, how easy it is to go with this particular approach depends a lot on the semantics of your chosen (or imposed) programming language.