Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mailrus!sharkey!dino!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!m.cs.uiuc.edu!liberte
From: liberte@m.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: Tail recursion in elisp
Message-ID: <4300051@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 3 Aug 89 23:03:48 GMT
References: <5724@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Lines: 11
Nf-ID: #R:pt.cs.cmu.edu:5724:m.cs.uiuc.edu:4300051:000:304
Nf-From: m.cs.uiuc.edu!liberte    Aug  2 18:29:00 1989


GNU Emacs bytecompiles tail recursive functions in the naive way.
It just makes a call to the function.  So your stack may
overflow.  

Iteration is much faster than recursion in GNU Emacs.
A while loop is compiled into a conditional branch.

A bytecode optimizer would make an interesting project.

dan