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I think what the OP meant about nested loops was that you can't directly write an inner loop that conditionally continues with the outer loop. In Scheme you'd w

I think what the OP meant about nested loops was that you can't directly write an inner loop that conditionally continues with the outer loop. In Scheme you'd write a named LET inside a named LET, with the inner one invoking the outer in a branch of an IF. With Clojure's loop/recur, as I understand it, you'd have to make the inner loop return a flag for the outer loop to test again about whether to recur, because the only construct you have for continuing a loop is 'recur'. This is not a rare situation. Am I missing something about how Clojure does it? My Lisp dialect (Cant) has a construct like the named LET, but with the name being optional (defaulting to 'loop'). This makes simple loops as concise as Clojure's, and fancier ones as flexible as Scheme's.

didibus 6y ago
You got the right idea, but in my three years of using Clojure professionally I never ounce needed this, so I feel at least in some cases like mine, this is a pretty rare situation.
- dkersten 6y ago
  In my ten years of Clojure, half of them professionally, I can probably count the amount of times I've used recur (outside of playing around) on my fingers. I typically don't need to use it because the sequence functions provide a better, higher level alternative. I see recur as quite a low level building block and the last thing I'll reach for. I'm pretty sure I've never used a nested recur.