Continue Considered Harmful? [closed]

Answer 1

Continue is a really useful function in most languages, because it allows blocks of code to be skipped for certain conditions.

One alternative would be to uses boolean variables in if statements, but these would need to be reset after every use.

Answer 2

I'd say yes. To me, it just breaks the 'flow' of a fluidly-written piece of code.

Another argument could also be that if you stick to the basic keywords supported by most modern languages, then your program flow (if not the logic or code) could be ported to any other language. Having an unsupported keyword (ie, continue or goto) would break that.

It's really more of a personal preference, but I've never had to use it and don't really consider it an option when I'm writing new code. (same as goto.)

Answer 3

I think there should be more use of continue!

Too often I come across code like:

for (...)
{
   if (!cond1)
   {
      if (!cond2)
      {
          ... highly indented lines ...
      }
   }
}

instead of

for (...)
{
   if (cond1 || cond2)
   {
      continue;
   }

   ...
}

Use it to make the code more readable!

Answer 4

continue feels wrong to me. break gets you out of there, but continue seems just to be spaghetti.

On the other hand, you can emulate continue with break (at least in Java).

for (String str : strs) contLp: {
    ...
       break contLp;
    ...
}

(This posting had an obvious bug in the above code for over a decade. That doesn't look good for break/continue.)

continue can be useful in some circumstances, but it still feels dirty to me. It might be time to introduce a new method.

for (char c : cs) {
    final int i;
    if ('0' <= c && c <= '9') {
        i = c - '0';
    } else if ('a' <= c && c <= 'z') {
        i = c - 'a' + 10;
    } else {
        continue;
    }
    ... use i ...
}

These uses should be very rare.

Answer 5

Is continue any more harmful than, say, break?

If anything, in the majority of cases where I encounter/use it, I find it makes code clearer and less spaghetti-like.