[Polpolion]

seriously **** that ****

why would even want to bother

it's really hard to implement in most cases even if you understand non-tail recursion, and it's STILL WORSE THAN NORMAL ITERATION

don't even care that it might prevent offbyone errors; in the time it takes to implement a tail recursive function, you could probably write the function iteratively and check it over for offbyone errors

seriously, what gives

[Iss Mneur]

The nice thing about tail recursion is, if you have a compiler that is optimizing it will transform the code into a non recursive iterative call. Which means that you get the advantages of readability that you get with recursion and without the overhead of recursion.

[Flipside]

Used to use this a lot in Z80 because of limited CPU speed and stack-size, a jmp used less cycles than a jsr, so with iterative calls the savings used to be quite noticeable, and you didn't kill the stack.

[Mongoose]

I don't know about tail recursion specifically, but I do know that I found working with Scheme to be utter hell in the one class I took which used it, as the whole damn language is recursive.  Ugh.

[Qent]

Really? They told us up front, "If you can get recursion, you'll be fine; if not, you're screwed," and soon I grew to love it.