Hi Folks,
In the book, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson,
Sussman, and Sussman, the authors assert that looping constructs (such as
xsl:for-each) are syntactic sugar:
One reason that the distinction between process and procedure
may be confusing is that most implementations of common languages
(including Java, C++, and C) are designed in such a way that the
interpretation of any recursive procedure consumes an amount of
memory that grows with the number of procedure calls, even when
the process described is, in principle, iterative. As a consequence,
these languages can describe iterative processes only by resorting
to special-purpose "looping constructs" such as do, repeat, until for,
and while. The implementation of Scheme ... does not share this defect.
It will execute an iterative process in constant space, even if the
iterative process is described by a recursive procedure. An implementation
with this property is called tail-recursive.
/Roger
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