Re: stopping a loop iteration without exiting it

[Micah Waddoups <micahwelf@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday, January 3, 2018 at 9:54:36 AM UTC-7, Mehdi Saada wrote:
> Is there a way to tell to ignore the remaining of a loop ? Like an exit statement, but instead of quiting the loop, it would go to the next iteration.
> Can we do this except with a recursive structure ?

Of all the things I've read in this post, I think the closest thing to the ideals and standards of Ada is the `goto My_Loop` idea.  Making any named structure flow control accessible with the goto statement, only specifying the next loop of such, and exiting any inner loops in the process reduces code written in some cases and more importantly, it is very clear where the decision to exit/continue-next is made and exactly which loop is being jumped to the next iteration.  This short-circuit behavior is similar to the `and then` and `or else` convention used in Boolean condition testing.

Unfortunately, this is not part of the Ada standard yet, and any changes/additions to the standard are not done lightly, since the real working world relies on the long-term maintainability and robust nature of Ada.  Therefore, it may never become part of the standard.  I personally hope that the goto <Named_Structure> convention is added, or if it is not, that some equivalent readability improvement is at least considered.  Even so, the main problem that probably prevented it from being added the first time it was suggested is that it stops a `for` loop, which is for the sake of perfect readability and predictability statically set to the range it is given.  Exiting is only very helpful and meaningful when a plain or named loop is used and it would be the same with the goto convention.  Since `goto` with labels is strongly discouraged, there is a subtle barrier of established practices and lint-like tools to repurposing 'goto' when the over-all improvement is mostly trivial.

These are my thoughts, and as a bit of a purist, I do wish for the goto convention to be added, but I also respect the reasons it may never be.