Reply To: Simulation

I would love to tackle something Lispish, but it pains me to say I couldn’t guarantee the time to do it. Tempt me with a simulator and I might have a go!

Regarding Scheme’s tail-calls and weird call/cc stuff: for a decade I worked on the Mercury compiler which had several back-ends, typically targetting GCC (there was at least one register-machine like “VM” and at least one native C back-end). For tail calls in the “native” C back-end, we’d resort to using GCC’s “goto label-variable” in various places. Tail recursion was converted into while loops, but non-inlined mutual recursion just left stuff on the stack. I cannot recall an instance where this got us into trouble, and we were running very large Mecury programs (a few commercial enterprises use Mercury as well).