Why I am a knee-jerk anti-loopist.

I've made these points before in different forums, but talking about LOOP has become popular again, so I'll just post a blog entry and point people at it. Here are the reasons I hate LOOP: 1. It is hard to predict what the resulting code will look like after it is expanded. You may *think* you know what it is doing, but you will probably be fuzzy about the details. This leads to bugs. 2. Loop makes it extremely difficult to write meta-level code that can manipulate loop expressions. A MAP expression is just a function call, but LOOP requires a serious state-machine to parse. You can macro-expand the LOOP away, but the resulting expansion is almost as hard to understand as the original. 3. LOOP operates at a low level of abstraction. One very frequent use of iteration is when you wish to apply an operation to a collection of objects. You shouldn't have to specify how the collection is traversed, and you certainly shouldn't have to specify a serial traversal algorithm if it doesn't matter. LOOP intertwines the operation you wish to perform with the minutiae of traversal --- finding an initial element, stepping to the next element, stopping when done. I don't care about these details. I don't care if the program LOOPs, uses recursion, farms out the work to other processors, or whatever, so long as it produces the answer I want. 4. LOOP encourages users to think linearly, sequentially, and iteratively. They start trying to flatten everything into a single pass, first-to-last, state-bashing mess. Suddenly they forget about recursion. I've seen this happen over and over again. It literally damages the thought process. (which is why I'm suspicious of named-let style loops)