Tail Calls

I saw this post from Tim Bray at ongoing the other day and thought it was pretty silly. I was going to comment on it but decided that Bray is a serious and knowledgeable guy who is entitled to his opinion even if anyone with functional programming experience might find it snort-worthy.

Along comes Ezra Cooper at Ezra's Research with a response to Bray. It's too good to pass up and says everything that I wanted to say only better. He also points out that “tail-call optimization” is a misnomer. I liked that because the tail-call optimization nonsense has always annoyed me.

Cooper's blog has a lot of juicy content, so it's worth taking a look at even if you have no interest in the tail-call contretemps.