Loops are generally special cases of recursion. You can always derive an iterator from a recursor by forgetting things, but you need product types or ambient st

Loops are generally special cases of recursion. You can always derive an iterator from a recursor by forgetting things, but you need product types or ambient state to go the opposite way. In Turing complete languages they're both special cases of fixed-point equations, though, so in that sense they both have the same goal.