Re: [Caml-list] Reporting on sucess/failure of tail recursion

[basile@starynkevitch.net]

> Say I have a file containing a number of Ocaml functions.

> We all know the advantages of tail recursive functions over non-tail
> recursive ones and some of us know if a simple function is tail
> recursice just by looking at it. However, for more complex functions
> it would be really nice if there was a compiler mode that could print
> which recursive functions in a file were tail recursive and which were
> not.

Functions are not tail-recursive, but function *calls* are (or not)
tail-recursive. I mean that a given function may have both tail
[-recursive]
and non-tail [-recursive] calls.

Maybe what you are dreaming of is an extension of the -dtypes flag (to
ocamlc) which not only computes the type of each expression,
but also flags each function *call* as a tail (or not a tail) call. I do
agree it would be quite useful (but my knowledge of ocaml internals make
me think that it is in principle easy, but in practice would require a lot
of changes within the compiler, since tail-rec detection is done in passes
near the backend, after the typing.).

We could even dream of a let tailrec language construct which behaves like
let rec but checks that each recursive call to the function is in fact a
tail-recursion.

All this is in principle easy to do, but I understand that it might
require a significant amount of work which is not the priority of INRIA
Cristal team (which is a team of researchers, not of engineers).

Regards.


-- 
Basile Starynkevitch http://starynkevitch.net/Basile

PS: I've currently got ADSL problems so have difficulties to read my emails.