[pjscott]

It's funny, but the thing I miss most from Common Lisp when I write in other languages is the LOOP macro. It's ugly, and non-lispy, but most loops I have to write can be expressed clearly and concisely using LOOP, and writing the equivalent code in another language is annoying.

I'm tempted to create a LOOP clone for Clojure, then laugh villainously as I unleash it upon the world.

[sedachv]

Loop, like structured editing (Paredit), is one of those Interlisp things that's very controversial and divisive.

There's tons of really wild ideas in Interlisp that seemed to be the half-baked acid trip ideas of West Coast hippies at the time, that are just starting to become rediscovered in the past couple of years (pervasive undo -> reversible debugging, DWIM-like autosuggestions in more places), and even the implementation techniques used are still innovative (for example the error-trapping implementation of Conversational Lisp (http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:4GnEnGS2XXkJ:c...) is quite similar to how Geoff Wozniak approached auto-defining functions (http://exploring-lisp.blogspot.com/2008/01/auto-defining-fun...)

[lispm]

LOOP is not from Interlisp. It comes straight from Maclisp.

'LOOPS' from Interlisp is something entirely different: an object-oriented extension to Interlisp.

[sedachv]

I'm going by the Hyperspec and what I remember from reading Kaisler's Interlisp. From the former:

"One of the Interlisp ideas that influenced Common Lisp was an iteration construct implemented by Warren Teitelman that inspired the loop macro used both on the Lisp Machines and in MacLisp, and now in Common Lisp."

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/01_ab....

[lispm]

It influenced it the Maclisp LOOP. The idea. That's all. The CL LOOP macro OTOH is a straight version of the Maclisp version. The MIT version of LOOP came from the same sources, even.

The Interlisp iteration facility looks slightly different. There are Interlisp manuals as PDF at bitsavers...

[gruseom]

LOOP is crack. Personally I love it.

Could you port CL's LOOP to Clojure easily? Or would its internal hyper-imperativeness make that tricky?

[lelele]

If you have to create a LOOP clone, why not creating an ITERATE one? ITERATE is cleaner, and it would follow the Clojure trend of bringing out the most modern features of Lisp.

http://common-lisp.net/project/iterate/doc/Don_0027t-Loop-It...

[leif]

> I'm tempted to create a LOOP clone for Clojure, then laugh villainously as I unleash it upon the world.

DOOOO IT