... or b) I want to do goto &subname; (which is an even more rare, but does have its uses in that it's the only way to "fake tailrecursion" in perl - see goto)

Actually thats not correct, it is neither the only nor the best way to "fake tailrecursion". The best way to fake tail recursion is to use a while or for loop. The overhead of goto &sub is actually quite expensive compared to a proper loop.

Tail recursion optimisation is only really important in languages which lack looping constructs. Yet the meme that "tail recursion optimisation is cool and useful" somehow manages to leak out of languages that really do need it into languages that don't really need it. And Perl has a rich set of looping constructs making tail recursion and its optimisation much less important than people think. This is actually one of the reasons that perl doesnt bother with this optimisation. (Its not the only reason tho given Perls dynamic nature.)

Remember that all tail recursion optimisation does is quietly convert your tail recursive call into a loop.

---
$world=~s/war/peace/g


In reply to Re^2: Using & in function calls by demerphq
in thread Using & in function calls by throop

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.