Switching between TCO and non-TCO at runtime

Here's a fun idea, that should work in a language with fexprs, or an incremental/reactive macro expander. It relies on the property that EVAL evaluates the form in tail position. Tail-call optimization could be switched off and on during debugging for more useful stack traces, and even arbitrarily at runtime. The loss of useful stacktraces is not a non-issue, as witnessed by attempts at more useful stack traces in MIT Scheme and in SISC.

How it works: all expressions in tail position (e.g. the last expression of a BEGIN, the last expression in a lambda, the branches of an IF, ...) are automatically (by the parser or something) wrapped in a call to the operator TCOIFY:

(lambda () (foo) (bar)) becomes
(lambda () (foo) (tcoify (bar)))

(if (quux) (do-something) (do-something-else)) becomes
(if (quux) (tcoify (do-something)) (tcoify (do-something-else)))

etc.

Ordinarily, TCOIFY would be a fexpr that directly evaluates its argument, in tail position:

(def tcoify (vau (x) env (eval x env)))

When TCOIFY is defined thusly, (tcoify expr) is equal to expr for the purposes of TCO, because EVAL evaluates X in tail position.

For useful stack traces, one would define TCOIFY as a function. Argument evaluation needs to happen before application, so TCOIFY would prevent TCO:

(def tcoify (lambda (x) x))

By switching between the two definitions of TCOIFY at runtime, tail-call optimization can be turned on and off.