I agree with you about changing entrenched behaviors, and POLA. Oh, well.

I applaud your examples of almost justifiable code. However, I think that these should be refactored to meet POLA as well. IMNSHO, the point of the continue block is to have a landing place for cleanup before restarting the loop, where, for convenience, any number of nexts can expect to go to get the house in order before the next loop. (last and redo don't skip any continue block.)

In the first example, if that code really needs to be in continue for some reason (I realized that process($data); might just be a placeholder for something bigger), then I would rewrite the continue block like so:

continue
{
  do {
    $data = getSample();
    print $logfile "Input contained $data";
  } until (not invalid($data));
}
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But I would also argue, for serious code, that even this doesn't belong here, and the main loop body needs to be refactored. I guess I'm thinking of a new aphorism, something like:

Don't do anything significant in a continue.

I would approach the second example much the same way, so I leave the details to OMAR.

Anyway, thanks for the debate. Short of getting anything changed, at least I've got it out of my system, even if I end up needing a Ka D'argo-like beating to do so =)