From: Guido van Rossum

But I have a problem with tail recursion. It's generally requested by new converts from the Scheme/Lisp or functional programming world, and it usually means they haven't figured out yet how to write code without using recursion for everything yet. IOW I'm doubtful on how much of a difference it would make for real Python programs (which, simplifying a bit, tend to use loops instead of recursion). And also note that even if an exception is not caught, you'd like to see all stack frames listed when the traceback is printed or when the debugger is invoked.

However, that doesn't preclude it from being a thesis subject - in some ways it's actually a bonus as it encourages exploration as it's a direction that is *not* going to be explored by the language designer. It's possible that we could see some truly unexpected benefits come out of this - or there could be no benefits to Python whatsoever. However, from a purely academic point of view, I think it would be a quite reasonable thesis. It allows applying a well-explorered field of research to a new arena. Besides ... sometimes a recursive solution is truly beautiful. Although I think in many (most?) cases a loop on a generator is probably the most appropriate and elegant approach. Tim Delaney