Comment by jhgb
6 hours ago
It gives you arbitrarily complex control flow even in presence of modularity. A tail call is a state transition. Without them, you'd have to resort to a big loop (which breaks modularity), or some sort of trampoline (which works but it's a bit clumsy).
this whole thing is equivalent to a goto at the beginning of a function.
This is true in the same sense that function calls are equivalent to gotos at the beginning and end of the function.
Yes, except without all the known disadvantages of goto. That's the whole point.