[plt-scheme] guido on tail recursion

Historically speaking this is wrong.

Actors was Hewitt's attempt to model Smalltalk.
Scheme was Steele and Sussman's attempt to understand Actors.
TCO was inherited from Actors. It is an OOP concept.

I confirmed this with Guy when I prepared for my ECOOP talk and I  
have the relevant email somewhere.

-- Matthias






On Apr 24, 2009, at 9:57 PM, hendrik at topoi.pooq.com wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 08:53:50PM -0400, Eli Barzilay wrote:
>> On Apr 24, Jordan Johnson wrote:
>>>
>>> On Apr 24, 2009, at 1:31 PM, Eli Barzilay wrote:
>>>> Yes.  I should also have added that control might go through
>>>> several pieces of code, and most such pieces of code will do the
>>>> "obvious thing" and end with tail calls -- so things just sort
>>>> themselves out.  (I remember that Joe Marshall phrased this nicely
>>>> at some point, I don't remember the sentence though.)
>>>
>>> Well, all this points up a chasm between the Schemers' terminology
>>> and Guido's: in his article he consistently used "TRE" / "tail
>>> recursion", while here the conversation is about "TCO" and tail call
>>> elimination.  Sounds like he's just focused on that one special
>>> case.
>>
>> Yes -- and that's not surprising when it's coming from someone who
>> didn't internalize the benefit of general tail calls: such people
>> usually think that this is just some overly sophisticated way to do
>> simple loops, which are more "understandable" with state...  I think
>> that Shriram's automaton thing is a good demonstration of what you  
>> can
>> get with tail calls, but the problem there is that it's buried in  
>> some
>> of that "macro" stuff which clearly only crazy people use.
>
> And that was the whole point of Scheme back in the dark ages when
> tail-recursin and continuations were being used to implement  
> various AI
> control structures and show how much more elegantly they could be done
> if built on continuation-passing.  The AI techniques were built into
> another kind of language that was implemented using tail-recursion and
> continuations.
>
> Just like the "macro" stuff.
>
> -- hendrik
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