Considering break and continue to be too powerful as control flow statements is a somewhat common opinion, in my experience. (I still use them, but only sparing

Considering break and continue to be too powerful as control flow statements is a somewhat common opinion, in my experience. (I still use them, but only sparingly, and where I am quite sure that they're not confusing.) That said, your second code block is unreadable to me -- even knowing what it does, it's just confusing. No way that that's more readable than making use of break here. If you don't want so many conditionals in the loop body, you can factor the first check out: no_yellow_things = (t for t in things if not t.is_yellow()) for t in no_yellow_things: if t.is_rainbow(): break t.thingify()