Re: [stack] disallowing recursive definitions

Joe Bowbeer scripsit:

> I do sort of see, now, how the anaphoric (from hell?) quality of stack
> programming languages does provide a lot of expressive power without the
> need to resort to recursion.

Remember the original context.  I was agreeing with the statement that
tail-calling is a confusing way to write down loops.  If you have loop
syntax, you can easily see where the loop begins and ends and exits.
If you just have tail calls, it's very easy to make a balls of it.

I'm not the only Schemer to think this: the standard has named-let and do
for this very reason, and there are lots of more general looping macros.
They all use tail-calling to *implement* loops, but that's not what's
at stake.


-- 
John Cowan  [email protected]  http://ccil.org/~cowan
Any sufficiently-complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc,
informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
        --Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming (rules 1-9 are unknown)