Practical Common Lisp

(loop for i from 1 to 10 do (print i))

Another, more dramatic, form of immediate execution is a return clause. This clause consists of the word return followed by a single Lisp form, which is evaluated, with the resulting value immediately returned as the value of the loop.

You can also break out of a loop in a do clause using any of Lisp's normal control flow operators, such as RETURN and RETURN- FROM. Note that a return clause always returns from the immediately enclosing LOOP expression, while a RETURN or RETURN-FROM in a do clause can return from any enclosing expression. For instance, compare the following:

(block outer
  (loop for i from 0 return 100) ; 100 returned from LOOP
  (print 'This will print')
  200) ==> 200

to this:

(block outer
  (loop for i from 0 do (return-from outer 100)) ; 100 returned from BLOCK
  (print 'This won't print')
  200) ==> 100

The do and return clauses are collectively called the unconditional execution clauses.

Conditional Execution

Because a do clause can contain arbitrary Lisp forms, you can use any Lisp expressions you want, including control constructs such as IF and WHEN. So, the following is one way to write a loop that prints only the even numbers between one and ten:

(loop for i from 1 to 10 do (when (evenp i) (print i)))

However, sometimes you'll want conditional control at the level of loop clauses. For instance, suppose you wanted to sum only the even numbers between one and ten using a summing clause. You couldn't write such a loop with a do clause because there'd be no way to 'call' the sum i in the middle of a regular Lisp form. In cases like this, you need to use one of LOOP's own conditional expressions like this:

(loop for i from 1 to 10 when (evenp i) sum i) ==> 30

LOOP provides three conditional constructs, and they all follow this basic pattern:

conditional test-form loop-clause

The conditional can be if, when, or unless. The test-form is any regular Lisp form, and loop- clause can be a value accumulation clause (count, collect, and so on), an unconditional execution clause, or another conditional execution clause. Multiple loop clauses can be attached to a single conditional by joining them with and.

As an extra bit of syntactic sugar, within the first loop clause, after the test form, you can use the variable it to refer to the value returned by the test form. For instance, the following loop collects the non-NIL values found in some-hash when looking up the keys in some-list:

(loop for key in some-list when (gethash key some-hash) collect it)

A conditional clause is executed each time through the loop. An if or when clause executes its loop-clause if test-form evaluates to true. An unless reverses the test, executing loop-clause only when test-form is NIL. Unlike their Common Lisp namesakes, LOOP's if and when are merely synonyms—there's no difference in their behavior.

All three conditional clauses can also take an else branch, which is followed by another loop clause or multiple clauses joined by and. When conditional clauses are nested, the set of clauses connected to an inner conditional clause can be closed with the word end. The end is optional when not needed to disambiguate a nested conditional—the end of a conditional clause will be inferred from the end of the loop or the start of another clause not joined by and.

The following rather silly loop demonstrates the various forms of LOOP conditionals. The update-analysis function will be called each time through the loop with the latest values of the various variables accumulated by the clauses within the conditionals.

(loop for i from 1 to 100
      if (evenp i)
        minimize i into min-even and
        maximize i into max-even and
        unless (zerop (mod i 4))
          sum i into even-not-fours-total
        end
        and sum i into even-total
      else
        minimize i into min-odd and
        maximize i into max-odd and
        when (zerop (mod i 5))
          sum i into fives-total
        end
        and sum i into odd-total
      do (update-analysis min-even
                          max-even
                          min-odd
                          max-odd
                          even-total
                          odd-total
                          fives-total
                          even-not-fours-total))

Setting Up and Tearing Down

One of the key insights the designers of the LOOP language had about actual loops 'in the wild' is that the loop proper is often preceded by a bit of code to set things up and then followed by some more code that does something with the values computed by the loop. A trivial example, in Perl,[241] might look like this:

my $evens_sum = 0;