It's not the same thing. `recur` in Clojure must be in tail-position. This program

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45154253

would therefore not work.

I was trying to say something like that with my note in the GP comment:

  > "nb. Clojure doesn't have automatic tail call optimisation. We need to explicitly emulate it with`recur`."