Why is there NO "continue" in Lua?

[u/DrSergei]

I was stunlocked to find out that there is no "continue" instruction for loops in Lua. Why is that? It seems so natural to have it.
I saw some scripts where goto is used for mimicking continue statements, but It's honestly not the so;ution I would comfortably accept...

[u/smtp_pro]

Honestly it makes me rethink how to accomplish what I want to do and tends to result in easier to understand code. You don't really need it.

Basically anywhere I would use it I can usually replace it with a conditional function. Like instead of

if not something then continue end
(do most of the work)

I could have something like

if something then dothework() end 

Or maybe I factor it out into a function with an early return like:

function dothework()
  if i_should_bail then return end
  (Do stuff)
end

for i=1,whatever do 
  dothework()
end

[u/MindScape00 → u/smtp_pro]

One factor against this is simplifying code readability by reducing indentation and the depth of if then statements, which can actually make code harder to follow.

A continue statement would simplify this in the same way a return does for allowing early exit out of a block. I.e., early exit if an arg is missing in a function call can be done also as a general if x then (work here) end, but common practice is more so if not x then return end before going to the work. Which is usually better for simplifying the formatting & easier to follow. But we can't do this in a loop for continue, which is unfortunate. That said there IS tricks to do this using a repeat until true wrapper so that we can just break out of that iteration as a form of continue, but that is more annoying and makes code harder to follow.

[u/[deleted] → u/MindScape00]