So apparently, there's been a big brouhaha over whether or not Python needs tail call optimization. This came to a head when someone shipped Guido a copy of SICP because he didn't "get it." I'm in the same boat as Guido. I understand the concept of tail call optimization. I just can't think of any reason why Python really needs it.
To make this easier for me to understand, could someone give me a snippet of code that would be greatly simplified using TCO?
Personally, i put great value on tail call optimization; but mainly because it makes recursion as efficient as iteration (or makes iteration a subset of recursion). On minimalistic languages you get huge expressive power without sacrificing performance.
On a 'practical' language (like Python), OTOH, you usually have a lot of other constructions for almost every situation imaginable, so it's less critical. Always a good thing to have, to allow for unforeseen situations, of course
If you intensely want to use recursion for things that might alternatively be expressed as loops, then "tail call optimization" is really a must. However, Guido, Python's Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), strongly believes in loops being expressed as loops -- so he's not going to special-case tail calls (sacrificing stack-trace dumps and debugging regularity).
Tail call optimization makes it easier to write recursive functions without worrying about a stack overflow:
def fac(n, result=1):
if n > 1:
return fac(n - 1, n * result)
return result
Without tail call optimization, calling this with a big number could overflow the stack.
I have been thinking to your question for years (believe it or not...). I was so deeply invested in this question that I finally wrote a whole article (which is also a presentation of one of my modules I wrote some months ago without taking the time to write a precise explanation of how to do it). If you are still interested in that question, please read my answer on my blog. In two words, I give a presentation of the tco module; you will not find anything that you can't already do without tail-recursion elimination, but you may be interested by my thoughts about it.
I know that mere links are not the preferred usage on Stackoverflow; please consider however that I wrote a whole article for answering to this post (which I refer to in the body of my article) including also some pictures for illustrating it. For this reason, I post here this unusual answer.
Guido recognized in a follow up post that TCO allowed a cleaner the implementation of state machine as a collection of functions recursively calling each other. However in the same post he proposes an alternative equally cleaner solution without TCO.
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/890461/explain-to-me-what-the-big-deal-with-tail-call-optimization-is-and-why-python-ne