<programming> (TRO) When the last thing a function or
procedure does is to call itself, it is not necessary to
retain the calling environment. This is important when a
procedure calls itself recursively many times since, without
tail recursion optimisation, the environments of earlier
invocations would fill up the memory only to be discarded when
(if) the last call terminated.
Tail recursion optimisation is a special case of last call
optimisation but it allows the further optimisation that some
arguments may be passed in situ, possibly in registers. It
allows recursive functions to be compiled into iterative
loops.
See also conversion to iteration, tail recursion modulo
cons.
