Re: CSI LISP

[Jim Meehan <Meehan@YALE.ARPA>]

    You didn't say anything about tail recursion ...

Right.  I'm  one of the world's great fans of tail-recursion elimination
(TRE).   I'm  forever  writing  programs  that  implement   finite-state
machines and  file-transducers  with  LABELS-forms  that  depend on TRE,
but most people don't.  At the Lisp  meeting  at  AAAI  last  summer,  I
asked the  panel  of  wizards  and implementors how they each felt about
TRE, and the consensus was that it was a nice idea  but  not  worth  the
trouble, a  view I found lamentable.  In fact, both VAX LISP and LISP/VM
eliminate *some* cases of tail-recursion (and in  VAX  LISP,  at  least,
you can  ask  for  a  bigger stack if you run out).  So we don't promise
TRE in CSI LISP.  I consider that to be a  bug  that  we  could  fix  at
great expense,  but  the  number  of  people  who care about it seems to
be small.

*sigh*

-- Jim
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