Tail call elimination

[Nick Sabalausky]

"bearophile" <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com> wrote in message 
news:ggmm4n$o6d$1 at digitalmars.com...
> - I know it's not necessary, just as closures aren't necessary in an OO 
> language,
> because you can create a class every time you may want a closure. But 
> functional
> programmers are used to use certain idioms, such idioms they are part of 
> the
> functional style of mind (and they are useful because you can build over 
> them.
> Functional programming is all about building functions using other 
> functions). If
> you want to push some functional-style in D (and I think it's a good 
> thing) then
> several things are necessary (quite useful) to allow such style of mind 
> (even if
> some of them may look redundant to nonfunctional programmer, like 
> closures).
> This is why I think things tail call elimination and a little may be 
> useful if D wants
> to become more functional.

Maybe I'm just too new to functional programming and tail call elimination, 
but I don't see how TCE could be needed for a functional frame of mind. It's 
just an optimization, right? And as I understand it, it just decreases 
performance hits from function call overhead and prevents the call stack 
from growing proportionally to the depth of recursion (or more simply, it 
just keeps the size of the call stack down). Can you provide an example 
situation where a lack of TCE would be a problem for a functional 
programmer?