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 continue?
• What workarounds are there for it?

Answer 1

In Lua 5.2 and upwards 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 2

The way that the language manages lexical scope creates issues with including both goto and continue. For example,

local a=0
repeat 
    if f() then
        a=1 --change outer a
    end
    local a=f() -- inner a
until a==0 -- test inner a

The declaration of local a inside the loop body masks the outer variable named a, and the scope of that local extends across the condition of the until statement so the condition is testing the innermost a.

If continue existed, it would have to be restricted semantically to be only valid after all of the variables used in the condition have come into scope. This is a difficult condition to document to the user and enforce in the compiler. Various proposals around this issue have been discussed, including the simple answer of disallowing continue with the repeat ... until style of loop. So far, none have had a sufficiently compelling use case to get them included in the language.

The work around is generally to invert the condition that would cause a continue to be executed, and collect the rest of the loop body under that condition. So, the following loop

-- not valid Lua 5.1 (or 5.2)
for k,v in pairs(t) do
  if isstring(k) then continue end
  -- do something to t[k] when k is not a string
end

could be written

-- valid Lua 5.1 (or 5.2)
for k,v in pairs(t) do
  if not isstring(k) then 
    -- do something to t[k] when k is not a string
  end
end

It is clear enough, and usually not a burden unless you have a series of elaborate culls that control the loop operation.

Answer 3

You can wrap loop body in additional repeat until true and then use break 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

The break is wrapped in do and end to keep Lua from complaining about the unreachable code below it. This isn't necessary if the break is wrapped in an if condition, as will be the case in most real-world code.

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 4

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 5

The first part is answered in the FAQ as slain pointed out.

As for a workaround, you can wrap the body of the loop in a function and return early from that, e.g.

-- Print the odd numbers from 1 to 99
for a = 1, 99 do
  (function()
    if a % 2 == 0 then
      return
    end
    print(a)
  end)()
end

Or if you want both break and continue functionality, have the local function perform the test, e.g.

local a = 1
while (function()
  if a > 99 then
    return false; -- break
  end
  if a % 2 == 0 then
    return true; -- continue
  end
  print(a)
  return true; -- continue
end)() do
  a = a + 1
end

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.

Answer 7

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 8

We can achieve it as below, it will skip even numbers

local len = 5
for i = 1, len do
    repeat 
        if i%2 == 0 then break end
        print(" i = "..i)
        break
    until true
end

O/P:

i = 1
i = 3
i = 5

Answer 9

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 10

Again with the inverting, you could simply use the following code:

for k,v in pairs(t) do
  if not isstring(k) then 
    -- do something to t[k] when k is not a string
end

Answer 11

Why is there no continue?

Because it's unnecessary¹. There's very few situations where a dev would need it.

A) When you have a very simple loop, say a 1- or 2-liner, then you can just turn the loop condition around and it's still plenty readable.

B) When you're writing simple procedural code (aka. how we wrote code in the last century), you should also be applying structured programming (aka. how we wrote better code in the last century)

C) If you're writing object-oriented code, your loop body should consist of no more than one or two method calls unless it can be expressed in a one- or two-liner (in which case, see A)

D) If you're writing functional code, just return a plain tail-call for the next iteration.

The only case when you'd want to use a continue keyword is if you want to code Lua like it's python, which it just isn't.²

What workarounds are there for it?

Unless A) applies, in which case there's no need for any workarounds, you should be doing Structured, Object-Oriented or Functional programming. Those are the paradigms that Lua was built for, so you'd be fighting against the language if you go out of your way to avoid their patterns.³

---

Some clarification:

¹ Lua is a very minimalistic language. It tries to have as few features as it can get away with, and a continue statement isn't an essential feature in that sense.

I think this philosophy of minimalism is captured well by Roberto Ierusalimschy in this 2019 interview:

add that and that and that, put that out, and in the end we understand the final conclusion will not satisfy most people and we will not put all the options everybody wants, so we don’t put anything. In the end, strict mode is a reasonable compromise.

² There seems to be a large number of programmers coming to Lua from other languages because whatever program they're trying to script for happens to use it, and many of them want don't seem to want to write anything other than their language of choice, which leads to many questions like "Why doesn't Lua have X feature?"

Matz described a similar situation with Ruby in a recent interview:

The most popular question is: "I’m from the language X community; can’t you introduce a feature from the language X to Ruby?", or something like that. And my usual answer to these requests is… "no, I wouldn’t do that", because we have different language design and different language development policies.

³ There's a few ways to hack your way around this; some users have suggested using goto, which is a good enough aproximation in most cases, but gets very ugly very quickly and breaks completely with nested loops. Using gotos also puts you in danger of having a copy of SICP thrown at you whenever you show your code to anybody else.