It just isn't needed, most things can be expressed using nothing more than recursion; more complex things can be expressed using `for` comprehensions, or by com

It just isn't needed, most things can be expressed using nothing more than recursion; more complex things can be expressed using `for` comprehensions, or by composing the various `Stream` APIs. I think `while` can more succinctly express certain patterns, but that window is pretty narrow, so adding an additional keyword to the language that has so much overlap with other options just doesn't make sense. Elixir is a little unique in that it has no mutability, so fundamentally a `while` loop isn't really a thing that makes sense - you can't mutate anything in the containing scope, so you are left with basically nothing useful you can do. The macro I build in this post is a clever way of making it work, but only with the bindings given to the macro, and it isn't actually mutating them. For other FP languages that are immutable, they likely don't have a `while`, or provide some kind of machinery that emulates it (like Haskell's monadic loops). For FP languages with opt-in mutability, they might have `while`, just depends on the language.