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

We encountered this scenario many times and we simply use a flag to simulate continue. We try to avoid the use of goto statements as well.

Example: The code intends to print the statements from i=1 to i=10 except i=3. In addition it also prints "loop start", loop end", "if start", and "if end" to simulate other nested statements that exist in your code.

size = 10
for i=1, size do
    print("loop start")
    if whatever then
        print("if start")
        if (i == 3) then
            print("i is 3")
            --continue
        end
        print(j)
        print("if end")
    end
    print("loop end")
end

is achieved by enclosing all remaining statements until the end scope of the loop with a test flag.

size = 10
for i=1, size do
    print("loop start")
    local continue = false;  -- initialize flag at the start of the loop
    if whatever then
        print("if start")
        if (i == 3) then
            print("i is 3")
            continue = true
        end

        if continue==false then          -- test flag
            print(j)
            print("if end")
        end
    end

    if (continue==false) then            -- test flag
        print("loop end")
    end
end

I'm not saying that this is the best approach but it works perfectly to us.