I didn't miss tail-call optimization much when I studied SICP using XLisp back in the 80s (with 640kb of memory) -- only a couple exercises blew the stack and m

I didn't miss tail-call optimization much when I studied SICP using XLisp back in the 80s (with 640kb of memory) -- only a couple exercises blew the stack and made me add a while loop. Of course it matters more for real programming on real data, and I agree with your comment generally.