What is tail recursion?

Question

Whilst starting to learn lisp, I\'ve come across the term tail-recursive. What does it mean exactly?

Answer 1

It means that rather than needing to push the instruction pointer on the stack, you can simply jump to the top of a recursive function and continue execution. This allows for functions to recurse indefinitely without overflowing the stack.

I wrote a blog post on the subject, which has graphical examples of what the stack frames look like.