A programming technique used to implement tail-call optimization in languages that don't natively support it. Functions return continuation objects instead of making direct recursive calls, preventing stack overflow.
The metaphor comes from the bouncing motion of a trampoline, coined in the 1970s by computer scientists. Just as a trampoline bounces you back up instead of letting you fall through, the technique 'bounces' function calls back to a loop instead of letting them accumulate on the call stack.
Trampolines are like having a safety net for recursion - instead of diving deeper and deeper into function calls until you hit the stack limit and crash, each function call 'bounces' back to a central loop that decides what to do next! This lets you write recursive algorithms that can run forever without running out of memory.
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