Not really. You don't want to recurse down the tail of a list, as in practice that's a great way to overflow the stack.
In practice, you want to recurse only on the elements of a list. And that's just how you'd handle a tree whose nodes are vectors instead of lists. So the implication that lists lead to recursion is a red herring.
Scheme is misleading because of its fetish of implementing iteration with tail calls.
Btw - Racket guarantees more than Scheme.
In Racket non-tail calls can't lead to a stackoverflow.
When a "potential stackoverflow" is detected the "frames" are moved to heap,
and the computation continues.
> Not really. You don't want to recurse down the tail of a list, as in practice that's a great way to overflow the stack.
The SICP book had a paragraph on the distinction before recursive process and recursive procedure. I can't remember which was which, but the point there was that recursive procedure could be an iterative process if it's written with tail recursion in mind, in which case it would not overflow the stack.
In practice, you want to recurse only on the elements of a list. And that's just how you'd handle a tree whose nodes are vectors instead of lists. So the implication that lists lead to recursion is a red herring.
Scheme is misleading because of its fetish of implementing iteration with tail calls.