> Is tail call elimination the same as tail call optimization? I know that schemes use this to keep the stack from blowing up during recursive function calls,

> Is tail call elimination the same as tail call optimization? I know that schemes use this to keep the stack from blowing up during recursive function calls, and that currently the JVM, and by extension Clojure is not able to handle this. Yes, the elimination of the tail call is the optimization. FWIW, Clojure handles this through syntax, so recursive algorithms are generally implemented with loop/recur forms that don't blow up the stack (instead of having a function literally call itself): https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/loop https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/loop