Clojure: How to to recur upon exception?

Macros are calling...

How about this:

(defn try-times*
  "Executes thunk. If an exception is thrown, will retry. At most n retries
  are done. If still some exception is thrown it is bubbled upwards in
  the call chain."
  [n thunk]
  (loop [n n]
    (if-let [result (try
                      [(thunk)]
                      (catch Exception e
                        (when (zero? n)
                          (throw e))))]
      (result 0)
      (recur (dec n)))))

(defmacro try-times
  "Executes body. If an exception is thrown, will retry. At most n retries
  are done. If still some exception is thrown it is bubbled upwards in
  the call chain."
  [n & body]
  `(try-times* ~n (fn [] ~@body)))

kotarak's idea is the way to go, but this question tickled my fancy so I'd like to provide a riff on the same theme that I prefer because it doesn't use loop/recur:

(defn try-times* [thunk times]
  (let [res (first (drop-while #{::fail}
                               (repeatedly times
                                           #(try (thunk)
                                                 (catch Throwable _ ::fail)))))]
    (when-not (= ::fail res)
      res)))

And leave the try-times macro as it is.

If you want to allow the thunk to return nil, you can drop the let/when pair, and let ::fail represent "the function failed n times", while nil means "the function returned nil". This behavior would be more flexible but less convenient (the caller has to check for ::fail to see if it worked rather than just nil), so perhaps it would be best implemented as an optional second parameter:

(defn try-times* [thunk n & fail-value]
  (first (drop-while #{fail-value} ...)))