Tail recursion optimization

Henry Spencer henry at utzoo.UUCP
Wed Apr 16 04:13:27 AEST 1986


> >A good optimizer should compile tail-recursion into a jump anyway...
> 
> There is a problem if you want to support a "nargs" function with this...

Nargs was a useful thing back in the days of V5 and early V6, when almost
everything in C was one word in size.  Its usefulness is greatly diminished
now that C's data types have gotten more diverse.  Especially since there
are serious portability problems involved in *doing* anything with the
information, and with implementing nargs at all.  For these reasons, most
everyone has stopped using it.  Nargs is not a major argument against a
potentially useful optimization.
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