Behavior of continue in do/while loops.

[Steven Schveighoffer]

"Downs" wrote
> Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> Nope :)  Alienating C/Java developers is not a good idea.
>>
>> -Steve
>>
>>
> miller[] came up with two good alternatives over in #D
> 1) forbidding continue in do/while and replacing it with continue
> do/continue while, or
> 2) adding goto do/goto while statements.
> The first one has the advantage of making it totally impossible for a
> newcomer to trip on this, while the second one has the advantage of not
> breaking existing code.
>
> Whaddya think?

I appreciate that you have issues with the continue statement, but I think 
they are very subtle, and very uncommon.  That and the fact that precedence 
is to have continue re-evaluate the condition will likely result in the 
language not changing.

I look at a do-while loop as a while loop that you want to execute at least 
once.  The whole goal of it was to eliminate having to re-code the loop 
contents outside the loop so this would occur.  What you want seems to me 
like a *restart* of the loop, not a *continuance*.  I think making continue 
skip the condition is prone to more problems then it is worth (imagine 
someone switching a while loop to a do-while and then some kind of infinite 
loop occurs because there was a continue statement).  I think adding syntax 
is not necessary since you can express your version of the loop easily with 
the current implementation.

However, seeing as how I never use goto in my code, and there is precedence 
for using goto in other constructs (goto case, goto default), I have no 
problem with adding goto do (goto while is already handled by continue). 
But it's not up to me :)

-Steve