Not pretty, but it does the trick. Kinda. Or at least it won't destroy the stack if you recurse too deep. from collections import namedtuple TailCall = na

Not pretty, but it does the trick. Kinda. Or at least it won't destroy the stack if you recurse too deep. from collections import namedtuple TailCall = namedtuple('TailCall', ['function', 'args']) def tail_recurse(fn, args): next_call = fn(*args) while isinstance(next_call, TailCall): next_call = next_call.function(*next_call.args) return next_call def count_to_4(start): """Dummy tail-recursive function""" if start == 4: return 4 else: return TailCall(count_to_4, [start + 1]) print tail_recurse(count_to_4, [-6])