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Software Engineering

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  • I'm trying to think of any way an aggressively optimizing compiler could do better, but it does seem like this is probably about it. The best I can come up with is that in the return n+f(); case, maybe the compiler could keep an int hanging around that it adds n to on every f() call because it knows that n+...+n+f() reduces to xn+f() and that last addition can wait until the final f() call. But that seems unlikely to be worth the effort. Commented Jan 10, 2016 at 17:50
  • @Ixrec: A good optimizers might sometimes inline a call, tail-call or not, and/or replace recursion with a loop. Commented Jan 10, 2016 at 17:54
  • You could have a function timesfactorial(x, n) which returns x * n! That function could call timesfactorial (x*n, n-1) which is tail recursive. Commented Nov 15, 2023 at 23:30