To quote the very first paragraph of the bytecode interpreter section[1]:
> The style of interpretation it uses—walking the AST directly—is good enough for some real-world uses, but leaves a lot to be desired for a general-purpose scripting language.
Sometimes it's useful to teach progressively, using techniques that were used more often and aren't as much anymore, rather than firehosing a low-level bytecode at people.
There is a chance that the title here was intentionally worded to answer a question people are likely to search for, then actually answer their concerns.
This is one of those natural consequences of "everything is an expression" languages that I really like! I like more explicit syntax like Zig's labelled blocks, but any of these are cool.
Try this out, you can actually (technically) assign a variable to `continue` like:
let x = continue;
Funnily enough, one of the few things that are definitely always a statement are `let` statements! Except, you also have `let` expressions, which are technically different, so I guess that's not really a difference at all.
Random note since Godbolt was mentioned: It's also fun to hop on play.rust-lang.org and see what different IRs look like via the "..." next to "RUN." Just look at how simple the HIR is pretty simple for "Hello world" - then check out the MIR ;)
> The style of interpretation it uses—walking the AST directly—is good enough for some real-world uses, but leaves a lot to be desired for a general-purpose scripting language.
Sometimes it's useful to teach progressively, using techniques that were used more often and aren't as much anymore, rather than firehosing a low-level bytecode at people.
[1] https://craftinginterpreters.com/a-bytecode-virtual-machine....