Re: [stack] disallowing recursive definitions

On Mar 3, 2008, at 2:48 PM, William Tanksley, Jr wrote:

>> An interesting point. A recursive tail call in an applicative  
>> language
>> can do one thing that a simple GOTO cannot: it can, at one stroke,
>> change the value of all the parameters of the function to something
>> else. This would certainly be sufficient to make an applicative
>> theorist blanch...
>>
>> Absolutely.  LAMBDA = GOTO + argument passing; that's what makes it
>> "ultimate".
>
> Now, interestingly, a concatenative tail-call cannot do this. Does
> this imply some superiority for concatenative optimizers? :-)

With a concatenative tail-call you're passing the stack as an  
argument. In other words, you pass the entire state of the program!

- John