We’ve seen the break in a switch statement. It stops running the blocks of code, and simple exits out of the switch.

In the same manner, if you use a break in a loop, it exits us from the loop prematurely (not by the loop condition).

The continue keyword moves us to the end of the loop body and starts us over again. This means that the loop will continue, just not the rest of the loop body.

While these keywords can be very powerful, and make coding easier – if misused, which is often the case, it makes your code harder to read, debug, and maintain.

Therefore, I recommend steering clear of break and continue in anything but the switch statement.

Break and Continue was originally found on Access 2 Learn

Assistant Professor

Walter Wimberly is an Assistant Professor at a regional college in Tennessee, teaching Computer Science in the Software Engineering track. He works as a student advisor, oversees curriculum changes, develops new courses, and manages the advisory panel.
Walter taught full time for about 7 years, before going back into “industry” as a full stack Software Developer for a dozen years. There he focused on web based projects coding in JavaScript/jQuery and utilizing the Bootstrap CSS Framework on the front-end, and coding in PHP, ASP/ASP.Net, SQL on the back-end.

Since he loves teaching, he taught as an adjunct web and digital media classes for eight (8) years, while working in industry, and has since returned to teaching full time.

He has been married for over 25 years, and is father to several special needs boys. As such, he is working on some projects to help others who have special needs to be self-sufficient, and support the care givers of those with special needs. Check out his Autism blog for more info.

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