On 7/15/2015 5:29 AM, Antoon Pardon wrote:
On 07/13/2015 05:44 PM, Th. Baruchel wrote:
Hi, after having spent much time thinking about tail-call elimination
in Python (see for instance http://baruchel.github.io/blog/ ), I finally
decided to write a module for that. You may find it at:
https://github.com/baruchel/tco
Tail-call elimination is done for tail-recursion as well as for
continuation-passing style (cps) in a consistent syntax for both usages.
Any tail-recursive function having the suitable format for being
embeddable in the Y combinator can be used here with no change at all
(with the main difference that tail-calls will be eliminated), but other
continuations can also be added
Can you explain how you would do mutual recursive functions?
Suppose I start with the following:
def even(n):
True if n == 0 else odd(n - 1)
def odd(n):
False if n == 0 else even(n - 1)
How do I rewrite those with your module?
I will not answer for Baruchel's tco module. However, combining the two
bodies and following the general rule of replacing tail recursive calls
with assignments inside a while loop gives us
def even(n):
return not odd(n)
def odd(n):
while True:
if not n:
return False
else:
n -= 1
if not n:
return True
else:
n -= 1
# which passes this test
print(even(0) is True, odd(0) is False,
even(1) is False, odd(1) is True,
even(2) is True, odd(2) is False,
even(5) is False, odd(5) is True,
even(6) is True, odd(6) is False)
I believe that this pattern should work with any set of mutually
recursive functions that always call each other in cyclic order. A more
elaborate version does not have this limitation.
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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