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On Jun 26, 2014 9:19 PM, "Coda Highland" <chighland@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 4:04 PM, Sean Conner <sean@conman.org> wrote:
> >> It's soooo much easier to analyze and comprehend the flow of control in a
> >> simple series of adjoining statements than it is across a series of function
> >> calls, especially recursive calls.
> >
> > I'll grant you it can feel wierd at first, seeing a bunch of functions all
> > call each other and not blow out the stack, but with exposure, you get used
> > to it. Heck, people got used to Perl, for crying out loud.
>
> <smug lisp weenie>I was recursing before it was cool.</smug lisp weenie>
If you approach it as a 6502 assembly language programmer, it makes sense too. Instead of writing
JSR PRINT
RTS
you peephole-optimize that to
JMP PRINT
Unix shell programmers will write
exec lua -lsocket ./foo.lua "$@"
in wrappers. If you read and write code like this long enough, your brain chunks "return f()" as "goto".
I argue that Lua is more clear than Scheme in this regard; in Scheme you have to know where the tail position is by the shape of the special form. "return <function-call-expr>" is explicit.
Jay