Python's "only one way to do it" philosophy isn't good?

[bruno.desthuilliers at gmail.com]

On Jun 9, 12:16 pm, James Stroud <jstr... at mbi.ucla.edu> wrote:
> Terry Reedy wrote:
> > In Python, you have a choice of recursion (normal or tail)
>
> Please explain this. I remember reading on this newsgroup that an
> advantage of ruby (wrt python) is that ruby has tail recursion, implying
> that python does not. Does python have fully optimized tail recursion as
> described in the tail recursion Wikipedia entry? Under what
> circumstances can one count on the python interpreter recognizing the
> possibility for optimized tail recursion?
>

I'm afraid Terry is wrong here, at least if he meant that CPython had
tail recursion *optimization*.

(and just for those who don't know yet, it's not a shortcoming, it's a
design choice.)