[Haskell-cafe] Flattening tail recursion?

[Bayley, Alistair]

http://haskell.org/hawiki/TailRecursive

A common technique to make a function tail-recursive is to introduce an
accumulating parameter, although in the 5 minutes I've spent looking on the
wiki, there's no specific page for this. Perhaps add a link from the
Efficiency section on  http://haskell.org/hawiki/CommonHaskellIdioms  ?


> -----Original Message-----
> From: GoldPython [mailto:goldpython at gmail.com] 
> Sent: 10 December 2004 15:07
> To: haskell-cafe at haskell.org
> Subject: [Haskell-cafe] Flattening tail recursion?
> 
> I'm missing something, a functional idiom, whatever. I know there's
> "length" to count the elements in a list and it works fine, but the
> function below stack overflows on a large list.
> 
>    countLines [] = 0
>    countLines (_:ls) = 1 + countLines ls
> 
> I would have thought that this was tail recursive and would be
> flattened into iteration by the compiler. Can anyone explain why? Is
> it because the call is embedded in an expression?
> 
> And additionally, how can I predict when the flattening will occur?
> 
> Thanks,
> Will
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> 

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