What is tail recursion and can you provide an example?

What is tail recursion and can you provide an example?

Tail recursion is a specific kind of recursion where the recursive call is the last operation in the function. This allows for optimizations by the compiler.

Can you show me a simple example of a tail recursive function?

Sure! Here's a simple example in Python that calculates the factorial of a number using tail recursion:

def factorial(n, accumulator=1):
    if n == 0:
        return accumulator
    return factorial(n - 1, n * accumulator)

In this example, the recursive call to factorial is the last operation.

What are the benefits of using tail recursion?

The main benefit of tail recursion is that it can be optimized by the compiler to avoid increasing the call stack, which prevents stack overflow errors for deep recursions.

Are there any languages that do not support tail call optimization?

Yes, some languages like Java and C do not guarantee tail call optimization, which means tail recursive functions may still consume stack space.