[chriswarbo]

> Iterative loops are much easier to analyze and reason about, by humans and by computers. For example, they always terminate.

It's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison to compare (proper, bounded) for-loops to general recursion. A more appropriate question would be whether humans and computers find, say, primitive recursion or structural recursion easier to analyse and reason about than for-loops.

The difference between general- and primitive-recursion becomes very apparent when working in Coq, for example!