Re: proper tail calls?

[David Given <dg@...>]

Nathan Linger wrote:
[...]
> Due to Lua's proper tail recursion, I expected the two to be
> operationally equivalent, but the functional version causes a stack
> overflow!

Lua only does tail recursion for statements of the form:

return functionname(arguments...)

In your case, you're doing:

return {argument, functionname()}

In order for Lua to be able to construct the table to return, it's got
to push its contents onto the stack... which means it's got to call
functionname() as a fully-fledged function call.

Sorry.

-- 
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