Why I Want Tail Recursion

The reason I want tail recursion is not to write loops (I can do that with a while loop), but to write in continuation passing style if I need to. Continuation passing style allows you to implement any control flow pattern you can imagine, not just the ones intrinsic to the language. You don’t want to use it all the time, but it’s a valuable fallback when you need some ad hoc advanced control flow. Without tail recursion, any non-trivial use of continuation passing style risks blowing the stack.

Iteration is just the special case of linear recursion that doesn’t accumulate state. 99 percent of the time, you know beforehand that you are looping and can use a looping construct, but sometimes you have the general case where whether you loop or not depends on the data at runtime. If you have tail recursion, you just write the code recursively and the tail recursion mechanism will turn it into a loop if it notices that you aren’t accumulating state.

If your language has lambda and tail recursion, it can implement any other control flow that might have been overlooked by the language designer. If it doesn’t, you're limited to the control flow the language designer bothered to implement.