Why Object-Oriented Languages Need Tail Calls – projectfortress Community - good post about tail-call-optimization. By Guy L. Steele - he should know what he's talking about, he was heavily involved in Scheme (the first language to explicitly mention tail recursion in its language description). Other languages he was directly involved with were Common Lisp, Java, and now Fortress. I hope this post will be read and understood by Guido van Rossum so that Python finally learns tail call optimization (yes, I know all the counterarguments and sorry, I don't find them particularly convincing).