<
programming> (Or "tail
call optimisation") Discarding the
immediate calling context (
call stack frame) when the
last
action of a function or procedure, A, is to
call another
function or procedure, B. B will then return directly to A's
caller, or possibly further up the
call stack if the
optimisation has been applied to several consecutive calls.
Last call optimisation allows arbitrarily deep nesting of
procedure calls without consuming memory to store useless
environments. This is particularly useful in the special case
of
tail recursion optimisation, where a procedure's
last
action is to
call itself (possibly indirectly).
(2007-03-16)