Question

I have just started learning Perl scripting language and have a question.

In Perl, what is the logical reason for having continue block work with while and do while loops, but not with for loop?

Answer 1

You can use a continue block everywhere it makes sense: with while, until and foreach loops, as well as ‘basic’ blocks — blocks that aren’t part of another statement. Note that you can use the keyword for instead of foreach for the list iteration construct, and of course you can have a continue block in that case.

As everybody else said, for (;;) loops already have a continue part — which one would you want to execute first?

continue blocks also don’t work with do { ... } while ... because syntactically that’s a very different thing (do is a builtin function taking a BLOCK as its argument, and the while part is a statement modifier). I suppose you could use the double curly construct with them (basic block inside argument block), if you really had to:

do {
    {
        ...;
        continue if $bad;
        ...;
    }
    continue {
        ...; # clean up
    }
} while $more;