And, besides everybody else's comments, I'd like to point out that tail recursion elimination _is_ feasible in Python as it is today. One can create a decorator meant only for suitable tail-recursion functions, that makes the bookkeeping of whenever the funciton is called - and in this book-keeping make the call to the decorated function inside a try-except block. If it is called reursively, it them raises an apropriate exception, that will make the execution continue on the frame-stack level of the first stack. I have a blog post with such a toy - nevertheless, it is just a toy. (If ther ewas soem small problem that could be elegantly approached in this fashion but not interactively, it could be used in production though) http://metapython.blogspot.com.br/2010/11/tail-recursion-elimination-in-pyth... js -><- On 26 May 2013 09:00, Ram Rachum <ram.rachum@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi everybody,
Here's an idea I had a while ago. Now, I'm an ignoramus when it comes to how programming languages are implemented, so this idea will most likely be either (a) completely impossible or (b) trivial knowledge.
I was thinking about the implementation of the factorial in Python. I was comparing in my mind 2 different solutions: The recursive one, and the one that uses a loop. Here are example implementations for them:
def factorial_recursive(n): if n == 1: return 1 return n * factorial_recursive(n - 1)
def factorial_loop(n): result = 1 for i in range(1, n + 1): result *= i return result
I know that the recursive one is problematic, because it's putting a lot of items on the stack. In fact it's using the stack as if it was a loop variable. The stack wasn't meant to be used like that.
Then the question came to me, why? Maybe the stack could be built to handle this kind of (ab)use?
I read about tail-call optimization on Wikipedia. If I understand correctly, the gist of it is that the interpreter tries to recognize, on a frame-by-frame basis, which frames could be completely eliminated, and then it eliminates those. Then I read Guido's blog post explaining why he doesn't want it in Python. In that post he outlined 4 different reasons why TCO shouldn't be implemented in Python.
But then I thought, maybe you could do something smarter than eliminating individual stack frames. Maybe we could create something that is to the current implementation of the stack what `xrange` is to the old-style `range`. A smart object that allows access to any of a long list of items in it, without actually having to store those items. This would solve the first argument that Guido raises in his post, which I found to be the most substantial one.
What I'm saying is: Imagine the stack of the interpreter when it runs the factorial example above for n=1000. It has around 1000 items in it and it's just about to explode. But then, if you'd look at the contents of that stack, you'd see it's embarrassingly regular, a compression algorithm's wet dream. It's just the same code location over and over again, with a different value for `n`.
So what I'm suggesting is an algorithm to compress that stack on the fly. An algorithm that would detect regularities in the stack and instead of saving each individual frame, save just the pattern. Then, there wouldn't be any problem with showing informative stack trace: Despite not storing every individual frame, each individual frame could still be accessed, similarly to how `xrange` allow access to each individual member without having to store each of them.
Then, the stack could store a lot more items, and tasks that currently require recursion (like pickling using the standard library) will be able to handle much deeper recursions.
What do you think?
Ram.
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