How To Do A For Loop In Elixir (using only recursion)

[Qqwy]

@bentanweihao

All these talk about fold reminds me of a paper that I’ve yet to read: A tutorial on the universality and
expressiveness of fold

Hm! Interesting paper. Very cool to see that so much can be built on top of foldr / foldl.

One thing the paper does not state, (and is often overlooked), is that foldl is tail-recursive, while foldr is not. There is a great example on the Haskell wiki about why this is the case.

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EDIT: It seems that the distinction between tail-call and non-tail-call functions in Erlang/Elixir is not that important.

See:

• Erlangs Tail Recursion is not a silver bullet
• the Eight Myths of Erlang Performance
• and also this rejected Pull-Request by me to add tail-recursion to the documentation of foldr/foldl