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Date: Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:07:38 -0500
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Context Managers
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From: larry@garfieldtech.com ("Larry Garfield")

On Tue, Apr 7, 2026, at 5:27 PM, Rowan Tommins [IMSoP] wrote:
> On 07/04/2026 17:20, Larry Garfield wrote:
>> We've updated the RFC to address the break question (new section), the continue question (which is now a secondary vote) 
>
>
> You are still relying on an incorrect explanation of the relationship 
> between "switch" and "continue":
>
>> This behavior is due to a quirk of PHP's design, where `switch` is treated as a looping structure, which most languages do not.
>
>
>
> "continue" is counted for switch statements not because it is "treated 
> as a loop", but because PHP has numbered break and continue targets. 
> Numbering break targets differently from continue targets would be 
> extremely confusing, so they have to target the same list of constructs.
>
> There was strong consensus on this point in the previous discussion.

Quoting from the Nikita post that is linked from the RFC:

---
a) In PHP "switch" is considered a looping structure, for this reason
"break" and "continue" both apply to "switch", as aliases. For PHP, these
are reasonable semantics, as PHP supports multi-level breaks. It would be
very questionable if "break N" and "continue N" could refer to different
loop structures just because there is a "switch" involved somewhere.
---

Switch being considered a looping structure does qualify as a "quirk" in my book.  

If we want break/continue to still always have the same numbering, then "do the same as switch, even though it is a Warning" is the only option.  Not having an early-success syntax at all is not an option on the table.

--Larry Garfield