Lambda the Ultimate

Dear Lambda Readers,

I'm to write a short paper on my experience in systems programming with Standard ML (should it be interesting for others). To make a difference it would be nice to have a refereed paper and to have it available for free. JFP and Software Practice & Experience retains the copyright. Do you know any other journal that allows free downloading?

Lots of buzz surrounding Clojure these days. The main knock on Clojure has been the lack of tail call optimization. Because of the current lack of TCO on the JVM, Clojure currently doesn't support automated TCO - though the plan is that if the JVM ever adds the capability, Clojure will implement it at that point. The recur syntax is a way to mimic TCO for self-recursion. Now the trampoline for mutual recursion is available for more involved forms of recursion:

I've added trampoline to ease the conversion/creation of mutually
recursive algorithms in Clojure.

Trampolines are a well known technique for implementing TCO - instead
of actually making a call in the tail, a function returns the function
to be called, and a controlling loop calls it, thus allowing chained
execution without stack growth.

As an aside, I have been tinkering with the language and it seems well thought out. For a newbie like myself, the main difference maker is the promotion of common sequences (lists, vectors, maps, sets) to built-in first class collections making it comparable in ease of use to other scripting languages.