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

Alexander Schmolck a.schmolck at gmail.com
Sat Jun 9 17:42:17 EDT 2007 
Josiah Carlson <josiah.carlson at sbcglobal.net> writes:

> James Stroud 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?
>
> Note that Terry said that you could do normal or tail recursion, he didn't
> claim that either were optimized.  

Well yeah, but without the implication how do the two words "or tail" add to
the information content of the sentence?

> As for why tail calls are not optimized out, it was decided that being able
> to have the stack traces (with variable information, etc.) was more useful
> than offering tail call optimization

I don't buy this. What's more important, making code not fail arbitrarily (and
thus making approaches to certain problems feasible that otherwise wouldn't
be) or making it a be a bit easier to debug code that will fail arbitrarily?
Why not only do tail-call optimization in .pyo files and get the best of both
worlds?

> (do what I say).

Where did you say run out of memory and fail? More importantly how do you say
"don't run out of memory and fail"?

'as
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