Subject: Re: Affordable Common Lisp implementations on Win95/98/NT?
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 2000/06/23
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3170783555887716@naggum.no>

* "Fernando" <frr@mindless.com>
| I was surprised because with mzscheme that test was almost
| instataneous (I mean the correct result, not the stack overflow O:-)
| and, as far as I know, it's interpreted code... :-?

  Why talk about Scheme?  Nobody answers questions about any other
  language than Lisp with reference to some irrelevant language.  Case
  in point: Scheme is _defined_ to be properly tail recursive.  If a
  Scheme implementation _didn't_ do tail recursive functions without
  growing the stack, even when interpreted, it would be a very bad
  Scheme implementation.

  In Common Lisp, it is recognized that tail call merging reduces the
  debuggability of the executing, and thus it's an option you decide
  to run on or off.  I don't know of any native Common Lisp compiler
  that doesn't _offer_ tail call merging.  A very minor problem is
  that how to invoke this option is not uniform across implementations.

#:Erik
-- 
  If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations.