[Python-Dev] [ python-Patches-876206 ] scary frame speed hacks

[Dennis Allison]

Josiah,

Since "any recursiton can be made iterative", would you support removing
recursion from Python (-:

Recursion is a natural way to program many things, particularly in Python.  
I believe it's a bad design choice to penalize recursive functions.  On
the other hand, specializing the code for non-recurive functions is
appealing--so, keep the free list and add the pre-built frame and bite the
bullet on complexity per Guido's comment.


On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, Josiah Carlson wrote:

> > I would be cautious about anything that slows recursive functions becasue
> > almost any interesting data structure traversal is recursive.  
> 
> Any recursion can be made iterative.  Sure, it can be a pain to do, but
> it is always a good exercise.  See this thread for a generic and involved
> example:
> http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&th=d04dcc083dc6d219&rnum=1
> 
> hierCodeTreePanel.new_heirarchy in the PyPE source code (pype.sourceforge.net)
> also has an example.