break and continue statements

[betseg]

⭐️ Proposed change

Adding ⏹ for breaking from a loop (maybe with a value like Rust does?) and ⏭ for continueing a loop. This may be even improved with labelled loops, tho its syntax would be harder to be agreed upon.

🤔 Rationale

A useful feature. I chose ⏭ because Unicode defines it as "next track", and ⏹ is "stop".

🕺Example

"Standard" break:

0 ➡️ 🖍🆕a
🔁 👍 🍇
  a ⬅️➕ 1
  ↪️ a ▶️ 5 🍇
    ⏹
  🍉
🍉

breaking with a value:

0 ➡️ 🖍🆕a
🔁 👍 🍇
  a ⬅️➕ 1
  ↪️ a ▶️ 5 🍇
    ⏹ a ❗️
  🍉
🍉 ➡️ thisVarIsSix

continue:

0 ➡️ 🖍🆕sum
🔂 i 🆕⏩⏩ 0 10❗️ 🍇
  ↪️ i 🚮 2 🙌 1 🍇
    ⏭
  🍉
  🙅 🍇
    sum ⬅️➕ i
    😀 🔡 sum 10 ❗️❗️
  🍉
🍉

[thbwd]

I haven’t heard of "breaking with a value" before. The same behavior could be easily achieved with a method, couldn’t it?

[betseg]

Yeah, it can be.

[thbwd]

⏹ is nice. ⏭ conflicts with https://www.emojicode.org/docs/packages/s/23e9.html#i⏭ though.
I don’t think that "breaking with a value" is something that fits Emojicode particularly well.

[betseg]

And what about breaking out of/continuing nested loops? Some languages have labels for that purpose. Example from Rust:

fn main() {
    'outer: loop {
        println!("Entered the outer loop");
        'inner: loop {
            println!("Entered the inner loop");
            // This would break only the inner loop:
            //break;
            // This breaks the outer loop:
            break 'outer;
        }
        println!("This point will never be reached");
    }
    println!("Exited the outer loop");
}

[thbwd]

Actually, I have rarely seen breaking to a specific loop being used in real production code, so I doubt it is something people will want to do in Emojicode. Moreover, it adds complexity to the reasoning the compiler does about flow control.

I’m not totally against this, but I don’t feel like implementing this myself.

[betseg]

what if it's not used because it's not in many languages sorry

[thbwd]

JavaScript, Java and Go, implement exactly this feature, for instance. C++, C and C# have labels with goto which would cover this use case. I think that covers a lot of code being written today...

[thbwd]

Thanks to the latest changes, ⏭ is no longer in use in the s package. We could use it for the 'continue' statement now.