Why does Lua have no “continue” statement?

Question

I have been dealing a lot with Lua in the past few months, and I really like most of the features but I\'m still missing something among those:

• Why is there no

Answer 1

You can wrap loop body in additional repeat until true and then use do break end inside for effect of continue. Naturally, you'll need to set up additional flags if you also intend to really break out of loop as well.

This will loop 5 times, printing 1, 2, and 3 each time.

for idx = 1, 5 do
    repeat
        print(1)
        print(2)
        print(3)
        do break end -- goes to next iteration of for
        print(4)
        print(5)
    until true
end

This construction even translates to literal one opcode JMP in Lua bytecode!

$ luac -l continue.lua 

main  (22 instructions, 88 bytes at 0x23c9530)
0+ params, 6 slots, 0 upvalues, 4 locals, 6 constants, 0 functions
    1   [1] LOADK       0 -1    ; 1
    2   [1] LOADK       1 -2    ; 3
    3   [1] LOADK       2 -1    ; 1
    4   [1] FORPREP     0 16    ; to 21
    5   [3] GETGLOBAL   4 -3    ; print
    6   [3] LOADK       5 -1    ; 1
    7   [3] CALL        4 2 1
    8   [4] GETGLOBAL   4 -3    ; print
    9   [4] LOADK       5 -4    ; 2
    10  [4] CALL        4 2 1
    11  [5] GETGLOBAL   4 -3    ; print
    12  [5] LOADK       5 -2    ; 3
    13  [5] CALL        4 2 1
    14  [6] JMP         6   ; to 21 -- Here it is! If you remove do break end from code, result will only differ by this single line.
    15  [7] GETGLOBAL   4 -3    ; print
    16  [7] LOADK       5 -5    ; 4
    17  [7] CALL        4 2 1
    18  [8] GETGLOBAL   4 -3    ; print
    19  [8] LOADK       5 -6    ; 5
    20  [8] CALL        4 2 1
    21  [1] FORLOOP     0 -17   ; to 5
    22  [10]    RETURN      0 1