Re: Proper Tail Recursive C++

njl@cyberpass.net (Nathan Loofbourrow) writes:


>William D Clinger <will@ccs.neu.edu> writes:
>
> int f (int n) {
> int A[1000];
> A[0] = n;
> A[999] = n;
> return g (A); // tail-recursive call to g
> }
>
>Well, since no one else tried it: g++ compiles this, but the result
>crashes. I gather that this is because it assumes that A is dead
>before the call to g(). This permits it the luxury of performing the
>tail recursion optimization, at the expense of producing code that
>doesn't work :-)


I'm sure the reason that it crashes is not that g++ generates
incorrect code, but rather that it just runs out of stack space.
(William Clinger's code had the above function recursively invoking
itself a million times.)


I think it is a real pity that Unix systems don't bother to give a better
error message for stack overflow than "segmentation violation".


--
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au>
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>
PGP: finger fjh@128.250.37.3
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