loop macro

["Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@C.CS.CMU.EDU>]

Dan,

 From your recent message, it sounds like you and I are not so far apart
after all.  It seems to me that with a bit of work, one could come up
with something that had all the functionality of the Zetalisp LOOP, but
with some parentheses to show you where one clause leaves off and
another starts instead of depending on a lot of syntactic analysis for
this.  The H-P and/or PCL constructs might serve as a starting point,
but I'm not wedded to the idea of always putting the counters at the
start.

I'm sure if we all thought hard about it, we could find ways of dealing
with such potential warts as UNTIL and ALWAYS.  Once you've got the
parens in there, things like COLLECT can be forms that are defined only
within the scope of a LOOP, but that can appear inside of Lisp
conditionals or other code.

If enough people like this idea, it would be worth the trouble of trying
to work out the details.  As long as we're divided into the camps of
"English-like LOOP is the only acceptable way" and "Over my dead body",
there's not much point in messing with this, however.

-- Scott