Greetings, Concerning the loop "continue" statement: In June of 1997 I put on comp.lang.ada the second draft of a paper titled "Goto Considered Necessary." The overall point of the paper was that gotos are sometimes needed in Ada, and one of the reasons was loop "continue" logic. If you want to see the paper, search c.l.a with Deja News, searching for "goto considered necessary" on Jun 11 1997. There was significant follow-up discussion, you can read the thread that this post started. One point in that paper is: "if your code needs a "goto" to work efficiently (or at all), you may have overlooked a simpler, better design." This includes loop "continue" statements. Sometimes they're the best structure, but they can often be designed around. The paper includes an example of code from Knuth's article about gotos in the December 1974 Computing Surveys. Now, this is an excellent article, and I recommend it. However, the particular code was cited as an example of a case where a "continue" is the best, clearest structure. It took me maybe 15 minutes to rework it without the "continue," resulting in a clearer and equally-efficient design. This does not prove that "continue"s are always less desireable, but it does show the benefit of considering them a candidate for re-structuring. One point that was brought up in the discussion about the paper was that using a "goto" prevents a common maintenance error. If some code must be added to the end of the loop to set up for the next iteration, a "continue" will skip that code. With the goto/label approach, there is a clear place at the end of the loop for any such set-up code. Here's a much-cut-down version of the paper's summary: a) In general, "goto" statements should be avoided. b) As a rule of thumb, if your code needs a "goto" to work efficiently (or at all), you may have overlooked a simpler, better design. c) Exceptions to "goto" avoidance: c1) a well-defined code structure that is not supported in the language. c2) machine-generated code c3) Finite State Machines (FMSs) c4) Other usages are suspect, but may be OK. d) an extraneous state variable or other kludge is no improvement on a "goto". e) Norm Cohen recommended Knuth's article in the December 1974 Computing Surveys as "the best discussion I've ever seen of the goto issue." Other respected Ada developers have concurred. f) The shared Ada culture avoids "goto" statements. Best, Sam Mize -- Samuel Mize -- [log in to unmask] (home email) -- Team Ada Multi-part MIME message: " ", " ", " " (hands waving) Fight Spam - see http://www.cauce.org/