This is really only essential in languages which provide recursion as a primitive and not iteration. Scheme is the prototypical example and was, I believe, the

This is really only essential in languages which provide recursion as a primitive and not iteration. Scheme is the prototypical example and was, I believe, the first to require tail call elimination in its standard for this very reason. In C it really doesn't matter that much because you can just write the iteration explicitly and then you know you won't blow out the stack since there is no recursive call in the first place. As a bonus, many programmers find it easier to understand.