The longer example is not great the point is it's a very language agnostic tradeoff of speed vs memory. Replace the ‘if’ conditionals with a case statement and its much faster you can speed it up further by using continue.

You can speed it up even more by having a jump at the end of each statement, but that stops looking like a loop and is basically just the tail call optimization.

Anyway, the important part is its low memory utilization and compiler independent.

PS: I in no way suggest tail call optimization was not useful; just you can mechanically simulate it when not available. You can usually beat that mechanical approach if you need to speed things up further.