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Comment by medo-bear | Hacker News Reader

yes the syntax for 'do is simple, like that of lisp. however 'do allows you to make far more complex iteration constructs than 'loop. 'loop is just a DSL to make some of these constructs more concise. read up on it

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LOOP has the DO functionality included.

Example:

    CL-USER 18 > (do ((a 1 (+ a 1))
                      (b 10 (* b 1.5))
                      (c nil))

                     ((> a 5) (list a b (reverse c)))

                   (push (* a b) c))

    (6 75.9375 (10 30.0 67.5 135.0 253.125))

    CL-USER 19 > (loop for a = 1 then (+ a 1)
                       and b = 10 then (* b 1.5)
                       and c = NIL then c

                       when (> a 5) do (return (list a b (reverse c)))

                       do (push (* a b) c))

    (6 75.9375 (10 30.0 67.5 135.0 253.125))

You can also express LOOP constructs in terms of DO. However if you were to construct a more exotic iterator that is not so straight forward in LOOP (beware of edge cases), I think it is more reasonable to pick DO. I think also that your example illustrates this.

I would miss the in-order collects, actually collect/maximize/... features, destructuring of lists, direct type declarations, ...

I also find DO not easy to read and understand.

The code from above I would actually write in LOOP as

    (loop for a from 1 upto 5
          and b = 10 then (* b 1.5)
          collect (* a b) into c
          finally (return (list a b c)))

I find that to be readable.

Of course to each their own. I like LOOP a lot actually when I need to do something familiar, however for something unfamiliar DO is often my choice. It also serves as a caution to tread and think carefully when I return to the code. Sometimes, after a while, I realise how to do the DO construct succintly with LOOP

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