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From: Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.javascript
Subject: Re: Using break in while loops bad habit?
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2016 01:50:56 +0000
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"Michael Haufe (TNO)" <tno@thenewobjective.com> writes:

> On Monday, January 18, 2016 at 4:50:47 AM UTC-6, Ben Bacarisse wrote:
>> "Michael Haufe (TNO)" writes:
<snip>
>> > I took your advice and sent an email to Martin Richards [2] from my
>> > .edu account. With any luck he would be willing and able to give some
>> > more explicit insight on the time period and this feature. It was a
>> > tumultuous period indeed.
>> 
>> Thanks.  I'm be interested to hear what he says (and I wonder why I
>> never thought to ask myself).  It seems unlikely that break was invented
>> for BCPL, but you never know...  CPL seems to have had a rather chaotic
>> design, so it may have had many features come and go.  And what
>> influences there were around at the time is hard to determine now.
>
> I got a reply today from Martin Richards. CPL did indeed have
> 'BREAK'.

Ah, right.

> To partially quote:
>
> "CPL did have a break command to cause an exit from a repetitive
> command such as while or until. As far as I remember it did not have
> an equivalent of continue, but the equivalent loop command was added
> to BCPL early in 1967."
> [...]
> "The introduction of break in CPL was almost certainly influenced by
> Dijkstra's paper..."
>
> He also provided the following document (see page 5):
>
> <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mr10/cpl2bcpl.pdf>

Very interesting.  Thank you.

-- 
Ben.