It wouldn't, because you would still have to do something else after the recursive call to your function. That would prevent you from applying tail-call optimiz

It wouldn't, because you would still have to do something else after the recursive call to your function. That would prevent you from applying tail-call optimization, which is the point behind making your function tail-recursive in the first place. For those who aren't familiar with tail-call optimization, here's a very simplified explanation: if the very last thing you do in a function is call it recursively, then instead of allocating the space for its local variables (and any other local state it might have) for another call, you can simply set the arguments to their new values, reset the local state and do an equivalent of "goto" to the beginning of the function.