On 26 June 2018 at 19:27, Nikita Popov <nikita....@gmail.com> wrote: > a) In PHP "switch" is considered a looping structure, for this reason > "break" and "continue" both apply to "switch", as aliases. For PHP, these > are reasonable semantics, as PHP supports multi-level breaks. It would be > very questionable if "break N" and "continue N" could refer to different > loop structures just because there is a "switch" involved somewhere. >
I think this point should be highlighted: this is not just an unfortunate legacy decision, it would be *really bad* if "break 2;" sometimes referred to a different loop from "continue 2;" Other languages don't have that problem, because they don't have the "continue N" syntax. I'm +0.5 on Nikita's proposal to make this an error - it can't mean anything other than "continue with this switch statement", but that doesn't actually mean anything. The error is effectively saying "Can't 'continue' a switch, because it's not really a loop." Perhaps rather than deprecating and removing it, we should simply raise a Warning on its use: "Use of 'continue' to terminate switch; did you mean 'break', or to continue a loop instead?" In other words, "we've done what you asked, but we think it might not be what you meant". Regards, -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP]
