On Fri, Oct 28, 2022 at 09:09:12AM -0400, Stefan Monnier via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor wrote: > Michael Heerdegen [2022-10-28 08:20:45] wrote: > > writes: > >> If you are doing it "by hand", why not indulge in Lisp's > >> "classic elegance", like so: [...] > > You don't want to implement such functions in Emacs with recursion > > because you'll easily hit `max-lisp-eval-depth' when they are called. > > Indeed (and it's significantly slower than the corresponding loop > without function calls). I /knew/ I was missing something. The back of my brain mumbled "does Emacs have tail recursion elimination or doesn't it?" > > Sorry to tell you, but a loop is the preferable way in Elisp. > > Luckily, since Emacs-28 you can have your cake and eat it too: > > (defun has-non-nil (lst) > (named-let loop ((lst lst)) > (cond > ((null lst) nil) > ((consp lst) (or (not (null (car lst))) (loop (cdr lst)))) > (t (error "Not a proper list! You cheater!"))))) Thanks for that :) > Admittedly, here the `named-let` construct gives you only the > elimination of tail-recursion, but in many other circumstances it > also leads to quite elegant code. Now I think of it, I saw something flashing past emacs-devel; back then I must have thought "oh, nice, I've got to play with this..." Now it sank in. So thanks :) Cheers -- t