Tail call is a subroutine call that happens inside another procedure as its final action; it may produce a return value which is then immediately returned by the calling procedure.
The call site is then said to be in tail position, i.e. at the end of the calling procedure. If any call that a subroutine performs, such that it might eventually lead to this same subroutine being called again down the call chain, is in tail position, such a subroutine is said to be tail-recursive, which is a special case of recursion. Tail calls need not be recursive – the call can be to another function – but tail recursion is particularly useful, and often easier to handle in implementations.
Tail calls are significant because they can be implemented without adding a new stack frame to the call stack. Most of the frame of the current procedure is not needed any more, and it can be replaced by the frame of the tail call, modified as appropriate (similar to overlay for processes, but for function calls). The program can then jump to the called subroutine. Producing such code instead of a standard call sequence is called tail call elimination, or tail call optimization. Tail call elimination allows procedure calls in tail position to be implemented as efficiently as goto statements, thus allowing efficient structured programming. In the words of Guy L. Steele "in general procedure calls may be usefully thought of as GOTO statements which also pass parameters, and can be uniformly coded as [machine code] JUMP instructions" – see history for further discussion.
Traditionally, tail call elimination is optional. However, in functional programming languages, tail call elimination is often guaranteed by the language standard, and this guarantee allows using recursion, in particular tail recursion, in place of loops. In such cases, it is not correct (though it may be customary) to refer to it as an optimization. The special case of tail recursive calls, when a function calls itself, may be more amenable to call elimination than general tail calls, when the function may be different.
