We all can disagree what constitutes overkill. But someone has gone a step further, and generalised persistant programs' ability to remember previously requested results. Check out Memoize ("trade space for time"). It inserts itself into the call-stream somewhat magically, and detects function calls that are identical, and returns the previously-computed value for the same input.

Of course, this only makes sense when the same input always results in the same output, as it would here. This can really speed up recursive results to the point where, for some functions, the recursively-computed value is faster than the iterative. And, of course, Memoize can help simplify non-recursive functions as well. It does require a bit of caution to ensure that there are no side effects possible on a function, though.

[time elapses...] Oddly, Memoize has a bunch of add-ons that I just saw when I checked it out on CPAN (to ensure I got the link correct above) which allows this to work even for non-persistant programs. That merits some more thought. Man, do I love perl. This would be incredibly programmer-intensive in basically any other language. But in perl, someone did it already, and I can just use it. That's too cool.

In reply to Re^2: Tail-recursion in perl?! by Tanktalus
in thread Tail-recursion in perl?! by neniro

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.