First I forgot to add I Xah Lee's ergo emacs was a valuable resource when learning Emacs. AFAIR it succintly explained emacs base abstractions. On the setq, I

First I forgot to add I Xah Lee's ergo emacs was a valuable resource when learning Emacs. AFAIR it succintly explained emacs base abstractions. On the setq, I what I meant was iterating through setqs and while (and I seem to recall even catch/throw) as agumonkey mentioned. Then again, 'in my mind', idiomatic elisp uses cl-lib :D. so (cl-incf total-count) would be better. snakeCase is unidiomatic as well.