On Wed, Oct 2, 2013, at 17:33, Terry Reedy wrote: > 5. Conversion of apparent recursion to iteration assumes that the > function really is intended to be recursive. This assumption is the > basis for replacing the recursive call with assignment and an implied > internal goto. The programmer can determine that this semantic change is > correct; the compiler should not assume that. (Because of Python's late > name-binding semantics, recursive *intent* is better expressed in Python > with iterative syntax than function call syntax. )
Speaking of assumptions, I would almost say that we should make the assumption that operators (other than the __i family, and setitem/setattr/etc) are not intended to have visible side effects. This would open a _huge_ field of potential optimizations - including that this would no longer be a semantic change (since relying on one of the operators being allowed to change the binding of fact would no longer be guaranteed). -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
