buzzwords

Hey /prog/

What's this ``tail recursion'' I keep hearing about?

Look up TCO (Tail Call Optimization), to understand what it is about. Alternatively, read your SICP, if you haven't.

Its for programmers who are afraid of a good old goto

>>3
I usually hand-compile my Scheme programs to C using just if and goto.

Tail recursion just means that the last thing that a function does is to call itself. It is a special case of a tail call, which is any function called as the last thing a function does. In some programming languages, usually functional ones like Scheme and Erlang, a tail call will be optimised so that it does not take up any extra space and therefore you can have an infinite tail recursion without having your program crash.