Re: [Haskell-cafe] Josephus problem and style

Thanks for your comments everyone! There is one point that has left me puzzled, though. From: Ross Paterson

You show a bias towards tail recursion. It would be neater (and lazier) to return the executed ones incrementally. This is easier if you don't distinguish the survivor from the rest, i.e. just put it on the end of the list.

Why is tail recursion a bad thing for a finite function? (Of course, it would be... curious on functions that can produce infinite results) Is tail recursion simply not the most common Haskell idiom, or is there some technical reason I fail to see? Anthony Chaumas-Pellet