Re: Studying and Maintaining GNAT, Is There Any Interest in a New Group?

[Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>]

Luke A. Guest <laguest@archeia.com> writes:
> My issue with FP is forcing recursion everywhere, that’s really
> unnatural and very difficult to think in, it’s natural for some
> algorithms but not all.

I'm not sure what you want to use instead.  Generally in Haskell one
doesn't use much explicit recursion but instead uses functions like map
and fold, to operate on collections all at once.  If you really want to
use something like a while-loop or for-loop, Ocaml has those:

 https://ocaml.org/learn/tutorials/if_statements_loops_and_recursion.html#For-loops-and-while-loops

but it's a pretty safe bet that they are just syntactic sugar for
recursive closures.  Haskell has some similar library functions that are
useful now and then:

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/monad-loops-0.4.3/docs/Control-Monad-Loops.html

Normally though, you wouldn't write a traditional imperative loop in a
functional language, because of the mutating index variable.  There are
alternate idioms and you get used to them.