Re: [stack] disallowing recursive definitions

John Nowak <[email protected]> wrote:
>  William Tanksley, Jr wrote:
>  > John Nowak <[email protected]> wrote:

> >> Indeed, and I'd argue that this is exactly why many people find
>  >> stack-
>  >> based languages universally problematic. They're taking issue with
>  >> all
>  >> of this state passing, although they phrase it like "I can't keep the
>  >> stack in my head". Of course this isn't a problem in practice,
>  >> particularly when you have type inference involved and can get a
>  >> quick
>  >> summary of what a function cares about, but it does seem to be the
>  >> source of many negative first impressions.

>  > Now we're treading on the marshy ground of subjective judgments... I
>  > don't think we're going to resolve this in this manner.

>  Resolve what? Are you talking to the right John?

I'm responding to your message, so I guess so -- I meant that I
disagree that this is the cause of people's discomfort, and also that
I disagreed that it was related to any trouble with tail-calls or
recursion.

However, after a good 5 minutes of digging, I found the source of our
confusion. I DID mix up my mind when referring to you two back when
you (Nowak) said that the entire state is passed through the
tail-call, and he (Cowan) said "No.  All you do is do an arbitrary
stack shuffle before the tail call."

I agree with the facts of what you said, Nowak (although I don't agree
that this makes concatenative languages "the ultimate GOTO", which
seems to be the implication of what you wrote), and I disagree with
you, Cowan, that performing an arbitrary stack shuffle complicates the
analysis of the tail-call.

>  > Let me quote you: "No.  All you do is do an arbitrary stack shuffle
>  > before the tail call."

>  Ah, now I'm sure you have the wrong John. I'm Mr. Nowak, he's Mr. Cowan.

Ah! Man, that WAS confusing. Sorry about that -- my fault.

>  - John

-Wm