Tail recursion considered harmful

It says so in R5RS¹:

By relying entirely on procedure calls to express iteration, Scheme emphasized the fact that tail-recursive procedure calls are essentially goto's that pass arguments.


_{¹http://schemers.org/Documents/Standards/R5RS/HTML/r5rs-Z-H-3.html#%_chap_Temp_3}

All this shit about goto being harmful only applies to goto in the sense of an instruction in a higher level language that causes program control to jump to another point in the source. The real reason we don't like goto is because its a low-level programming construct, and these should be kept out of high-level programming, the same as we don't care how a machine allocates memory. Assembly uses goto all the time, in fact some way of referring to other instructions is neccessary for all computing machinery as we know it today to work.

This argument is just using the old and often misunderstood stigma on "goto" to make an argument about something entirely different.