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I've been reading this thread and found the related paper: "Proper Tail Recursion and Space Efficiency" on the Proceedings of the 1998 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) by William D Clinger. I quote the Abstract: "The IEEE/ANSI standard for Scheme requires impementantions to be properly tail recursive. This ensures that portable code can rely upon the space efficiency of continuation-passing style and other idioms. On its face, porper tail recursion concerns the efficiency of procedure calls that occur within a tail context. When examinded closely, proper tail recursion also depends upon the fact that garbage collection can be asymptotically more space-efficient than Algol-like stack allocation. "Proper tail recursion is not the same as ad hoc tail call optimization in stack-based languages. Proper tail recursion often precludes stack allocation of variables, but yields a well-defined asymptotic space complexity that can be relied upon by portable programs. "This paper offers a formal and implementation-independent definition of proper tail recursion for Scheme. It also shows how an entire family of reference implementations can be used to characterize related safe-for-space properties, and proves the asymptotic inequalities that hold between them." I'm not saying I actually understand/can use this work, but maybe a look to it you gurus could give another starting point. Reference is: ACM 0-89791-987-4/98/0006 ____ Javier Abdul Cordoba Gandara http://www-lce.cem.itesm.mx/~al446684 abdul@acm.org "Is it over by just forgetting? I can't forgive anybody who forget their sadness, love, hate.... Because... I never did..." -- Vampire Princess Miyu