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

Straight from the designer of Lua himself:

Our main concern with "continue" is that there are several other control structures that (in our view) are more or less as important as "continue" and may even replace it. (E.g., break with labels [as in Java] or even a more generic goto.) "continue" does not seem more special than other control-structure mechanisms, except that it is present in more languages. (Perl actually has two "continue" statements, "next" and "redo". Both are useful.)

Answer 2

In Lua 5.2 the best workaround is to use goto:

-- prints odd numbers in [|1,10|]
for i=1,10 do
  if i % 2 == 0 then goto continue end
  print(i)
  ::continue::
end

This is supported in LuaJIT since version 2.0.1

Answer 3

Lua is lightweight scripting language which want to smaller as possible. For example, many unary operation such as pre/post increment is not available

Instead of continue, you can use goto like

arr = {1,2,3,45,6,7,8}
for key,val in ipairs(arr) do
  if val > 6 then
     goto skip_to_next
  end
     # perform some calculation
  ::skip_to_next::
end

Answer 4

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 <continue.lua:0,0> (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

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

I've never used Lua before, but I Googled it and came up with this:

http://www.luafaq.org/

Check question 1.26.

This is a common complaint. The Lua authors felt that continue was only one of a number of possible new control flow mechanisms (the fact that it cannot work with the scope rules of repeat/until was a secondary factor.)

In Lua 5.2, there is a goto statement which can be easily used to do the same job.