Comment by eru

You could imagine a language like eg Python with a for-each loop that creates a new variable for each run through the loop body.

Basically, just pretend the loop body is a lambda that you call for each run through the loop.

It might make sense to think of the common loops as a special kind of combinator (like 'map' and 'filter', 'reduce' etc.) And just like you shouldn't write everything in terms of 'reduce', even though you perhaps could, you shouldn't write everything in terms of the common loops either.

Make up new combinators, when you need them.

For comparison, in Haskell we seldom use 'naked' recursion directly: we typically define a combinator and then use it.

That often makes sense, even if you only use the combinator once.