RE: [Caml-list] @, List.append, and tail recursion

["Harrison, John R" <johnh@ichips.intel.com>]

| Actually, recursion seems to be very cheap- the recursive append function 
| is signifigantly faster than the reversing append, and almost as fast as 
| the set_cdr function.

Yes indeed. This is why I think we shouldn't discourage people from using
recursion by imposing arbitrary depth limits.

| > and at least the implementation
| > would do its best to carry recursions as far as possible. The only
| > reason I can see for placing a limit on the stack size is that users
| > become aware of trivially looping recursions more quickly. But this
| > doesn't seem a particularly strong argument.
|
| I like becoming aware of problems in my code as quickly as possible.  It 
| lets me fix them quicker.

Surely looping recursions aren't such a common problem that it really
matters much? And one has other cues, like the excessive time taken by the
evaluation.

John.
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