Re: Tail call elimination

[Paul Smith]

On Wed, 2020-05-20 at 17:17 +0000, Tim Murphy wrote:
> So if guile is a good language which does math in postfix notation
> (+ 1 1)

You mean prefix notation :)

I do have fond memories of postfix notation from my HP calculator but
it wouldn't work for GNU make.

> then I don't see why make can't be the same and since this is roughly
> the way make operations work now you can avoid inventing a lot of
> rules about what you "might need" in future.

I don't have a problem with prefix notation per se.  You're right it
does mean we don't have to care at all about grouping or associativity
issues, and we can just rely on make's already-existing parsing
capabilities.

This would mean: $(+ 5 $(* 7 2 3) 9) --> 56

However, it does mean we have to implement a lot of little functions
(one for each operator) rather than one function that can do all the
things.

Maybe that's still a good tradeoff.