PEP 255: Simple Generators

[David Eppstein]

In article <3B3181D1.BFB73057 at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz>,
 Greg Ewing <greg at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

> Your proposal might work in the case where the recursion
> involved is tail-recursion, but using tail-recursion in
> place of iteration is a functional idiom that doesn't fit
> very well in Python, IMO.

I'm sorry, this was a little too densely packed for me, could you expand 
it?  Why is tail recursion somehow unPythonlike?  Or, more to the point, 
why should it remain that way?  If it's merely that it is implemented 
inefficiently (i.e. piling up unnecessary stack frames) then that can be 
fixed, no?  And anyway we were discussing a situation (PEP255) where stack 
frames are not really at issue.

I have been using Python a very short time, but one thing I like very much 
about it is its spirit of allowing all sorts of programming idioms -- it 
doesn't force object orientation etc down your throat but it allows you to 
write each program the way it makes the most sense.  If a program makes the 
most sense tail-recursively, why should that be discouraged?
-- 
David Eppstein       UC Irvine Dept. of Information & Computer Science
eppstein at ics.uci.edu http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/