Well, Perl was made by a linguist. It strikes me that 'break' is very machine oriented where 'last' is very human oriented. The computer knows that when it's looping it is in a state to be 'broken', but when a person (imagine a real newbie here) comes along and reads your code, they will try and read it through like a story. "while this is true do this. Unless you see that, which will be that last time you do this." flows very well.

There may be better reasons than this. I am not a guts guy and this may have to do with the guts. But this seems like a very good reason to me - having just gotten through the first half of Camel ed3.

-- I'm a solipsist, and so is everyone else. (think about it)