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7.10 Break and continue statements

The one-token statements continue and break may be used within loops to alter control flow; continue causes the next iteration of the loop to run immediately, whereas break terminates the loop and causes execution to resume after the loop. Both control structures must appear in loops. Both break and continue scope to the most deeply nested loop, but pass through non-loop statements.

Although these control statements may seem undesirable because of their goto-like behavior, their judicious use can greatly improve readability by reducing the level of nesting or eliminating bookkeeping inside loops.

Break statements

When a break statement is executed, the most deeply nested loop currently being executed is ended and execution picks up with the next statement after the loop. For example, consider the following program:

while (1) {
  if (n < 0) {
    break;
  }
  foo(n);
  n = n - 1;
}

The while~(1) loop is a “forever” loop, because 1 is the true value, so the test always succeeds. Within the loop, if the value of n is less than 0, the loop terminates, otherwise it executes foo(n) and then decrements n. The statement above does exactly the same thing as

while (n >= 0) {
  foo(n);
  n = n - 1;
}

This case is simply illustrative of the behavior; it is not a case where a break simplifies the loop.

Continue statements

The continue statement ends the current operation of the loop and returns to the condition at the top of the loop. Such loops are typically used to exclude some values from calculations. For example, we could use the following loop to sum the positive values in the array x,

real sum;
sum = 0;
for (n in 1:size(x)) {
  if (x[n] <= 0) {
    continue;
  }
  sum += x[n];
}

When the continue statement is executed, control jumps back to the conditional part of the loop. With while and for loops, this causes control to return to the conditional of the loop. With for loops, this advances the loop variable, so the the above program will not go into an infinite loop when faced with an x[n] less than zero. Thus the above program could be rewritten with deeper nesting by reversing the conditional,

real sum;
sum = 0;
for (n in 1:size(x)) {
  if (x[n] > 0) {
    sum += x[n];
  }
}

While the latter form may seem more readable in this simple case, the former has the main line of execution nested one level less deep. Instead, the conditional at the top finds cases to exclude and doesn’t require the same level of nesting for code that’s not excluded. When there are several such exclusion conditions, the break or continue versions tend to be much easier to read.

Breaking and continuing nested loops

If there is a loop nested within a loop, a break or continue statement only breaks out of the inner loop. So

while (cond1) {
  // ...
  while (cond2) {
    // ...
    if (cond3) {
      break;
    }
    // ...
  }
  // execution continues here after break
  // ...
}

If the break is triggered by cond3 being true, execution will continue after the nested loop.

As with break statements, continue statements go back to the top of the most deeply nested loop in which the continue appears.

Although break and continue must appear within loops, they may appear in nested statements within loops, such as within the conditionals shown above or within nested statements. The break and continue statements jump past any control structure other than while-loops and for-loops.