last call optimisation

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last call optimisation



Normally when procedure A calls procedures B, C, .., Z, the environment of procedure A is only discarded when procedure Z returns and procedure A itself terminates. Using last call optimisation, A's environment is discarded as Z is called. This allows arbitrarily deep nesting of procedure calls without consuming memory to store useless environments.

A special case of this is tail recursion optimisation where the last procedure called is the calling procedure itself.