That might be true. It is indeed complex if you look at the BNF in the hyper-spec. (http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/m_loop.htm http://www.

That might be true. It is indeed complex if you look at the BNF in the hyper-spec. (http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/m_loop.htm http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/m_loop...) If you ignore the hyperspec, however, and get a feel for it by looking at examples and writing code using it, it becomes quite simple. It is very useful when you are translating C or Java code. (http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/doc/cl/loop.html http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/doc/cl/loop.html) I find it quite readable in comparison to many of common lisp alternatives for iteration. And I kind of disagree that simple things aren't simple. For example: (loop for i from 0 below 10 do ...) Is pretty much the simplest construct that you normally need. Granted, I would likely just use dotimes in that case... but lets say you are iterating between 5 and 15, dotimes becomes unwieldy, where the for loop is pretty much the same code with the numbers changed. (loop for i from 5 below 15 do ....) Now try incrementing by 2 (loop for i from 5 below 15 by 2 do ....) compare to the similar do* code (do* ((i 5 (+ i 2))) ((>= i 15)) ....) kind of a toss up to me. Not that I don't understand your point... in fact, as little as a year ago, I felt that way too... but I have since changed my mind. My current preference is to use do* if writing a macro that needs iteration, and to use loop when I am doing something similar to a list comprehension or array traversal.