[spapas82]

For tco to be really useful you need to think in a non procedural way. Imagine that you don't have loops in your language so you need recursion to do stuff multiple times.

Also even in procedural languages there are some problems that are easier to understand and model if you use recursion, for example tree or graph like structures.

[artemonster]

traversing graph or a tree is not a TCO case because it would involve a stack/queue for DFS/BFS, whatever. I dont want to think in non procedural way, I reserve this nonsense to haskellers, please provide me a valid python use case for TCO :)

[bfffbgfdcb]

Traversing a graph and inspecting each node can definitely make good use of tail call optimization.

For instance: you have a large graph and you are traversing a particular path through it — say a R/B tree seeking a node. You can write it iteratively or recursively. Neither needs to hold more than 1 node reference at a time, the choice is which you prefer to read and write.

I prefer to write that recursively. Sounds like you may not. Observing “well I can write it iteratively so why do I need TCO” is obvious and uninteresting; that’s the point.