On 30 March 2026 19:48:05 BST, Larry Garfield <[email protected]> wrote:
> ... break is the natural keyword for that, as it already means "stop this
> control structure and go to the end of it."
>
>continue means "stop this iteration of a control structure and go to the next
>one." But in this case, there is no next one. switch makes it an alias for
>break, for whatever reason lost to history, but given that it now throws a
>warning that seems to now be considered a mistake, so we don't see a reason to
>propagate that mistake.
I agree with Tim that making break and continue define targets differently is a
really bad idea.
It's fine for a single "break;" or "continue;", but with PHP's count-based
targeting, it would lead to cases like this:
if ( definitely_right($loop_item) ) {
$found_item = $loop_item;
break 4;
}
elseif ( definitely_wrong($loop_item) ) {
// targeting the same loop, but there's a couple of "using" or "switch"
blocks in between
continue 2;
}
If "break 2" terminates a "using" block, there are only two sane behaviours for
"continue 2":
- terminate that same block, as though it was a single-iteration loop
- throw an Error, because the operation is not meaningful
Looking back at the discussion of "continue targeting switch", I see I made the
same point back then: https://externals.io/message/102393#102500
The consensus in that discussion was to *only* add a Warning, with no plan for
further changes. It's not a deprecation, or a workaround for hard to change
legacy behaviour; it's just a helpful hint to the developer that their code
might have a mistake in it.
Regards,
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]
