Thanks James. If any one else is as new to functional stuff as me then I found this in Paul Graham's book which enables me to reason logically about the matter (hopefully)
"A good compiler can compile a tail call into a goto, and so can compile a tail recursive function into a loop. In typical machine language code, when control arrives for the first time at the segment of instructions representing len (a local fn) there is information on the stack saying what to do upon returning. Because nothing remains to be done after the recursive call, this information remains valid for the second call as well" On Jun 15, 11:28 pm, James Reeves <jree...@weavejester.com> wrote: > On 15 June 2010 22:56, Quzanti <quza...@googlemail.com> wrote: > > > Thanks Mike. > > > So does is the only kind of recursion optimisation tail recursion? > > > Can you only eliminate stack calls in tail calls? > > No, you can also eliminate stack calls using lazy-seq or trampolines. > > If you provide some example code of what you are currently doing, it > would be easier to gauge what is the most suitable approach. > > You might not even need to bother eliminating stack calls, if you know > you're never going to recurse very far. > > > Having some sort of hint about this in the recur documentation might > > be helpful? > > Well, the docs do say "recur in other than a tail position is an > error", though that does assume the reader knows what the tail > position of a function is. > > - James -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
