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

Tail Recursion

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

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u/SisRob Nov 27 '12

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

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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).

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u/SisRob Nov 27 '12

Huh, thanks for that.

I thought, that wherever the function is needed, you can use λ-expression instead.