Re: why tail recursion matters and why Java isn't it, was Re: lisp performance was Re: problems with lisp

[Guy Steele - Sun Microsystems Labs <address@hidden>]

LOOP doesn't handle everything (such as vector-add),
but it makes a lot of very common cases easier to
handle.  So I wouldn't preclude Common Lisp (or any
other language) from having something like LOOP,
but it's important to recognize that (a) more general
mechanisms are needed to cover the hairier cases,
and (b) appropriate pedegogy is needed so that programmers
will know the general mechanisms and when they are to
be preferred to LOOP.

WHat bugs me is languages that make LOOP-like things
easy but make the more general mechanisms much, much
harder (or impossible) to use.

--Guy Steele

P.S. Yes, per Pascal Costanza, Common Lisp with proper tail
recursion and call/cc WOULD be a better language.