Scala's for-comprehensions: vital feature or syntactic sugar?

Question

When I first started looking at Scala, I liked the look of for-comprehensions. They seemed to be a bit like the foreach loops I was used to from Java 5, but with functional rest

Answer 1

for-comprehensions are syntactic sugar, but that doesn't mean they aren't vital. They are usually more concise than their expanded form, which is nice, but perhaps more importantly they help programmers from imperative languages use functional constructs.

When I first started with Scala I used for-comprehensions a lot, because they were familiar. Then I almost stopped completely, because I felt like using the underlying methods was more explicit and therefore clearer. Now I'm back to using for-comprehensions because I think they better express the intent of what I'm doing rather than the means of doing it.