Comment by diffxx

I think it's really unfortunate that most programmers are taught c style loops before tail recursion. But this is also a symptom of standard c's problem of not allowing one to define functions inside of functions. A loop can always be expressed with tail recursion. While the reverse is also true, there are many problems for which this is not straightforward given that a tail recursive function can have multiple exit points and these have to be coalesced into a single flag for the loop.