It's funny, because in some cases you can write HDL code that looks like a loop - but in this context a loop instantiates multiple instances of some piece of logic.
And this kind of distinction was what we were having trouble conveying to said software guy (I say this as a software guy myself), and I think the author of the LISP CPU is having the same problem.
I think I'd explain that particular bit by simply saying that there was no run-time looping construct, only a compile-time looping macro to generate runtime code. Most software people would get that, I think.
