His primary concern seems more to be stack traces.
At the time, an explicit style, with patch, was proposed to python-ideas. [0] It was based around continuation-passing-style, and the conclusion reached then by the community was the same. TCO, explicit or not, isn't wanted in Python.
> And that's exactly the point -- the algorithms to which
TCO can be applied are precisely the ones that are not
typically expressed using recursion in Python. - Greg Ewing [1]
> <sarcasm>Perhaps we should implement "come from" and "go to" while we're at it. Oh, let's not leave out "alter" (for those of you old enough to have used COBOL) as well! </sarcasm> - Gerald Britton [2]
Feel free to try again, maybe things have changed.
To be clear, I wish Python did have a mechanism to express these sorts of problems, but I don't think the Python team themselves want them. This issue has come up more than a few times, and the dev team have never been satisfied that Python really needs it.
I tried making such a patch in the past, got stuck in the much of trying to update the grammar file in a way that wouldn't complain about ambiguity
Main thing to get from tail calls vs loops is the case of mutually recursive functions