At its core, Common Lisp provides two primitives for performing iteration. The first of those primitives is recursion. Recursion is an amazing technique, but in this post I am going to focus on the other primitive goto.

Goto is extremely powerful. It lets you manipulate the control flow of your program in anyway you can think of. This freedom to do whatever you want is also what makes goto so dangerous. In any given piece of code that uses goto, it is difficult to tell what the purpose of the goto is because it could be used for so many different reasons. Because of this, most languages provide various kinds of builtin loops instead of providing raw goto. Even though loops arent as general as goto, they express the intention of the code much more clearly.

As an example, lets say you want to print all of the characters in a file. If your language provided while loops, you could do this by printing characters from the file one at a time while there are more characters left. If Common Lisp had while loops,¹ the code for this procedure would look like this:

(while (peek-char file nil nil)
  (write-char (read-char file)))

If your language only had goto, it becomes much more difficult to implement the procedure. In the end, you have to, in some way, simulate a while loop. One way to code the procedure with just goto is the following. First check if there are any characters left in the file. If there arent any, goto the end. Otherwise print the next character and go back to the start. Here is Common Lisp code that implements this:²

(tagbody
  start
  (if (not (peek-char file nil nil))
      (go end))
  (write-char (read-char file))
  (go start)
  end)

Not only is the version with goto much more verbose, it is also much harder to understand. The code lacks clarity because goto is so general. It gives you no context into how it is being used. The reader of the code will have to think about the positioning of all of the gotos before they can think about the overall flow of the program. On the other hand, in the version with the while loop, merely the fact that a while loop is being used gives whoever is reading the code a decent idea of the control flow.

In reality all loops are eventually compiled down to gotos. Whenever the compiler for a language that provides loops sees a loop, it generates code that simulates the loop through goto. You can do the same thing with Lisp macros!

If you don’t know, Lisp macros are compile time functions which take code as their input and return code as their output. When Lisp code is being compiled, all of the macros in the code are called and each one is replaced with its result. This means you can write a macro that looks like a while loop when you use it, but at compile time generates code to simulate a while loop through goto. You are in effect adding while loops to the Lisp compiler! Here is code that defines such a macro:

(defmacro while (test &body body)
  (let ((gtop (gensym))
        (gend (gensym)))
    `(tagbody
       ,gtop
       (if (not ,test)
           (go ,gend))
       ,@body
       (go ,gtop)
       ,gend)))

With this macro, the first code example is now valid lisp code! The while macro takes as arguments a test and a body. It then generates code that uses the method used in the second example to simulate a while loop with goto. You can actually see what the first example looks like after expanding the macro by using the function macroexpand. Here is what the generated code looks like:

(tagbody
  #:g729
  (if (not (peek-char file nil nil))
      (go #:g730))
  (write-char (read-char file))
  (go #:g729)
  #:g730)

The generated code is the exact same as the code in the second example except for the names of the labels. This means the two examples are the same functionally! The only real difference between them is that the first one is expressed in terms of loops, and the second one is expressed in terms of goto. Since it is so much easier to think in terms of loops than goto, there is no reason why you wouldnt use the first example over the second.

Macros allow you to build any feature you want as long as it is possible to simulate that feature through lower level features. With respect to goto, this means you can build any kind of control flow construct you want by simulating it with goto and then putting a macro on top. In Common Lisp, all of the looping constructs (do, do*, dotimes, dolist, loop) are really just macros that expand into goto. This is what Alan Kay meant when he said Lisp isnt a language, its a building material. It bears repeating. In Lisp, you can build any feature you want as long as it is possible to simulate that feature in terms of lower level features.

1. Common Lisp does provide the do macro, which can be used as a while loop. I’m not mentioning it for pedagogical reasons.
2. In Common Lisp, you need to use tagbody when creating labels because otherwise the labels would be interpreted as variables to be evaluated.