Duncan Booth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Tim N. van der Leeuw wrote:
>
> > The other thing I do not understand, due to my limited understanding of
> > what is tail-recursion: factorial2 (Duncan's definition) is not proper
> > tail-recursion. Why not? How does it differ from 'real' tail recursion?
>
> Tail recursion is when a function calls itself and then immediately returns
> the result of that call as its own result.
I think the definition is broader than that so that these two functions would
also be tail-recursive (i.e. the tail call doesn't have to be a self-tail
call; I might be mistaken, don't have a good reference at hand; however
"properly tail recursive" certainly refers to being able to do the below
without exhausting the stack even for large n, not just transforming self-tail
calls to a loop, which is sort of limited usefulness anyway):
def even(n):
return n == 0 or not odd(n-1)
def odd(n):
return n == 1 or not even(n-1)
'as
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