Personally, I find that traversing data structures recursively is more straightforward than iterative approaches, at least for most of the data structures I dea

Personally, I find that traversing data structures recursively is more straightforward than iterative approaches, at least for most of the data structures I deal with. This sort of thing, for example: (defun search (tree val) (cond ((null tree) nil) ((= (car tree) val) tree) ((< (car tree) val) (search (cadr tree) val)) ((> (car tree) val) (search (cddr tree) val)) ) ) I write this sort of code all the time for more complicated structures; iterative solutions would involve keeping track of a bunch of local variables, which only makes the code more difficult to deal with.