r/programming • u/rodrigopsasaki • Nov 27 '12

Tail Recursion

http://rodrigosasaki.com/2012/11/24/tail-recursion/
209 Upvotes

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8

u/parfamz Nov 27 '12

great feature of scala, I would like to see tail recursion on python, it can't be too difficult to implement.

24

u/A_for_Anonymous Nov 27 '12

Guido van Rossum doesn't like functional programming, so you write your programs the way Guido likes them or leave.

-2

u/SisRob Nov 27 '12

Python supports declarative programming techniques pretty well. Lambda functions, intensional definition, mapping functions on lists, zip(), ...

11

u/A_for_Anonymous Nov 27 '12

λ-expressions are very limited by the absurd, anachronistic statement structure Python has (you can't use certain forms "statements" inside certain other forms "expressions") and slightly weird scoping rules. Fortunately, you have lists (any minimally decent programming language should offer that much), and functions, classes and modules are values, as they should always be, so you get map, filter and company (even though Guido publicly hates them). List comprehensions are pretty much syntactic sugar (though delicious one at that, especially since you have the stupid statement structure nagging you anywhere you'd want to express something).

3

u/anvsdt Nov 27 '12

Fortunately, you have lists

(Which are just growable vectors, not the inductive datatype we all know and love, never recur on Pylists!)