Caleb Madrigal

Programming, Hacking, Math, and Art

  

Tail call optimization in Python

Since I've been getting into functional programming more recently, the fact that Python doesn't do tail-call optimization has been bothering me. So I did a bit of searching, and found this gem: Tail Call Optimization Decorator.

Here is a snippet from it:

import sys

class TailRecurseException:
  def __init__(self, args, kwargs):
    self.args = args
    self.kwargs = kwargs

def tail_call_optimized(g):
  """
  This function decorates a function with tail call
  optimization. It does this by throwing an exception
  if it is it's own grandparent, and catching such
  exceptions to fake the tail call optimization.

  This function fails if the decorated
  function recurses in a non-tail context.
  """
  def func(*args, **kwargs):
    f = sys._getframe()
    if f.f_back and f.f_back.f_back \
        and f.f_back.f_back.f_code == f.f_code:
      raise TailRecurseException(args, kwargs)
    else:
      while 1:
        try:
          return g(*args, **kwargs)
        except TailRecurseException, e:
          args = e.args
          kwargs = e.kwargs
  func.__doc__ = g.__doc__
  return func

@tail_call_optimized
def factorial(n, acc=1):
  "calculate a factorial"
  if n == 0:
    return acc
  return factorial(n-1, n*acc)

So it is a decorator that you place on a tail-call recursive function. This basically lets the function continue executing rather than throwing the RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded exception. Note however, that this is not still not very optimal. But is does kind of simulate TCO.

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