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Almost, there is one unstated additional qualification: all the above is only true if you don't believe in (or cannot use) boring old iterative loops and must implement an algorithm recursively.

I found it hard to believe the article went to the extent of explaining TCO (with assembly language!) and space complexity without bothering to mention this little assumption.

Since Python favours iteration over recursion I have some sympathy with GVR on this one.



The "Lambda: The Ultimate GOTO" paper shows a still-timely example of when you might want to express a state machine as mutually recursive functions. Granted, they compare to the actual GOTO, but you can't make state machines of any manageable size with iteration, either.




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