Brent Yorgey wrote:
What, strictly speaking, is the definition of ”tail recursive” as opposed to just “recursive”?
A recursive function is tail recursive if the final result of the recursive call is the final result of the function itself. If the result of the recursive call must be further processed (say, by adding 1 to it, or consing another element onto the beginning of it), it is not tail recursive.
With that said, tail recursion is not that useful of a concept in a lazy language like Haskell.
What, non-strictly speaking, is the definition of "tail call" in Haskell as opposed to an eager language? For example in the following ML code, fun eager x = if p x then f x else g x both (f x) and (g x) are clearly tail calls, even if they appear in the syntactic context of the if-then-else expression. However, (p x) is clearly not a tail call. We can understand this by taking the operational behavior of the if-then-else expression into account: (p x) is evaluated first, then either the result of evaluating (f x), or the result of evaluating (g x) is returned without further processing. Now consider the same example in Haskell: lazy x = if p x then f x else g x Haskell's if-then-else expression has the same operational behavior as ML's, so again, (f x) and (g x) are tail calls. Now consider a variant: if' a b c = if a then b else c variant x = if' (p x) (f x) (g x) I would say that if' has the same operational behavior as an if-then-else expressions, and therefore, (f x) and (g x) are still tail cails, even if they now appear in the context of another function call. I think that a definition of tail calls in Haskell should take the strictness properties of functions into account. Such Haskell tail calls would have the same nice properties as tail calls in an eager language, but they would reflect that fact that it is hard to analyse strictness in Haskell. And I think that this makes for a much more friendly migration path. Instead of telling people: "No, forget about tail calls, in Haskell, you need something else", you could tell them: "Yes, tail calls are the way to go, but in Haskell, they look different". Tillmann