Programming Perl, 3rd Edition

Loop Statements

All loop statements have an optional LABEL in their formal syntax. (You can put a label on any statement, but it has a special meaning to a loop.) If present, the label consists of an identifier followed by a colon. It's customary to make the label uppercase to avoid potential confusion with reserved words, and so it stands out better. And although Perl won't get confused if you use a label that already has a meaning like if or open, your readers might.

while and until Statements

The while statement repeatedly executes the block as long as EXPR is true. If the word while is replaced by the word until, the sense of the test is reversed; that is, it executes the block only as long as EXPR remains false. The conditional is still tested before the first iteration, though.

The while or until statement can have an optional extra block: the continue block. This block is executed every time the block is continued, either by falling off the end of the first block or by an explicit next (a loop-control operator that goes to the next iteration). The continue block is not heavily used in practice, but it's in here so we can define the for loop rigorously in the next section.

Unlike the foreach loop we'll see in a moment, a while loop never implicitly localizes any variables in its test condition. This can have "interesting" consequences when while loops use globals for loop variables. In particular, see Section 2.11.2 in Chapter 2 for how implicit assignment to the global