From: jwesley <justin.w.smith@...>
Date: 2005-12-18T23:57:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby tail recursion

The reason that tail recursion is "important" is that functional
programming style generally avoids using iterators (or more generally
it avoids changing any variable after it's initialized).

So instead of a "loop", one would use recursion.  So most "functional"
programming languages require any implementation of that language to
properly handle tail-recursion.  With this "optimization" one can
freely implement an algorithm in the "functional" style w/o concerns of
it bombing out when the input is too large.

I found that ~1300 is the maximum depth of the stack on my machine....
So I can't use recursion to iterate over more than ~1300 items.