You're changing the topic of conversation from 'recur' to 'tail-call elimination', but I'll bite. I don't understand your argument. How is the decision to tak

You're changing the topic of conversation from 'recur' to 'tail-call elimination', but I'll bite. I don't understand your argument. How is the decision to take advantage of tail-call elimination any less a part of an algorithm's implementation than the decision to, say, use a lazy iterator rather than read into an intermediate array? If it's not the best tool for what you're trying to do, certainly, don't use it, but there are plenty of legitimate places where it is needed, so why argue against it?