Clojure's loop/recur is pretty much a degenerate version of Scheme's named let, which has been part of Scheme since long before Clojure was a thing: (define

Clojure's loop/recur is pretty much a degenerate version of Scheme's named let, which has been part of Scheme since long before Clojure was a thing: (define (sum xs) (let loop ((acc 0) (xs xs)) (if (null? xs) acc (loop (+ acc (car xs)) (cdr xs))))) It's often used in Scheme for iteration, including cases where you would otherwise need to define a helper function to implement an iterative (tail-recursive) version of a function, as I did with sum above. The named let construct is more general than loop/recur, since you can supply a name and properly nest the forms.