Tail Recursion

The annoying thing about being a writer who has focused a lot on learning his craft is that I now have a constant editorial chatter now when I'm reading. Typos, awkward sentences, factual problems. They all crop up and prevent me from just taking in what I'm reading.

I was reading through a Scala book the other day, and I noticed this blurb in a section about tail recursion.

(If you don’t fully understand tail recursion yet, see Section 8.9).

8.10 Conclusion

The editor in my brain pounced on this end sentence, which cross-references to the same section the reader has just finished.

It took a beat before the programmer side of my brain woke up and noticed the joke.

Tail recursion is when the last instruction in a method is a call to the same method. To take an example from the book,

def boom(x: Int): Int =
         if (x == 0) throw new Exception("boom!")
        else boom(x - 1) + 1

In this specific case, boom calls itself on the last line of the method. That's tail recursion.

And the last sentence in that section is a perfect example.