Wow, this is basic stuff. I'm surprised that a researcher would get this wrong. Also, let us not forget that tail recursion is a specific form of the more gene

Wow, this is basic stuff. I'm surprised that a researcher would get this wrong. Also, let us not forget that tail recursion is a specific form of the more general tail call optimization. For example, the following is two TCO-able functions calling each other: functionA(...): // do stuff return functionB(...) functionB(): // dostuff return functionA(...) Whether or not the compiler optimizes this, however, is a completely different question.