Here's a really simple example where continue actually does something measureable:

animals = ['dog', 'cat', 'pig', 'horse', 'cow']
while animals:
    a = animals.pop()
    if a == 'dog':
        continue
    elif a == 'horse':
        break
    print(a)

You'll notice that if you run this, you won't see dog printed. That's because when python sees continue, it skips the rest of the while suite and starts over from the top.

You won't see 'horse' or 'cow' either because when 'horse' is seen, we encounter the break which exits the while suite entirely.

With all that said, I'll just say that over 90%¹ of loops won't need a continue statement.

^{1This is complete guess, I don't have any real data to support this claim :)}

A while loop runs while a condition is true. True is always true, so it will run until something causes it to break (e.g. a break statement, program crash, etc.) For comparison, the first loop in the code you posted could be rewritten without an infinite loop as: age = input("Enter your age: ") while not age.isdecimal(): age = input("Please enter a number for your age: ")

while True means loop forever. The while statement takes an expression and executes the loop body while the expression evaluates to (boolean) "true". True always evaluates to boolean "true" and thus executes the loop body indefinitely. It's an idiom that you'll just get used to eventually! Most languages you're likely to encounter have equivalent idioms.

Note that most languages usually have some mechanism for breaking out of the loop early. In the case of Python it's the break statement in the cmd == 'e' case of the sample in your question.

while will always evaluate whatever comes behind it. For instance i =0 while i < 10: print(i) i = i+ 1 Here i <10 is evaluated to either be true or false. This will happen each iteration. i = 0 , True i= 1, True i= 2, True Etc, untill: i=10, False => break loop The code will continue untill it evaluates to false. while True kind of hacks it: True will always evaluate to True. While looks at it and thinks: hey this is true! So it always continues. While true isn't commonly used, but when it is it's commonly used with a break statement. (Or interrupted by ctrl + c). While False will never do anything in the loop as you stated. It checks to see if False is True. But it's never true, so it doesnt execute the code in the while loop. (Sorry fod bas formatting, mobile)

as others have said continue skips over everything after it and goes back to the start of the loop. if it was at the very end of the loop I dont think it was necessary to write the continue statement. it would have gone back to the beginning of the loop regardless. x = 0 while x < 10: print(x) x = x + 1 continue will do the same as x = 0 while x < 10: print(x) x = x + 1 however if you had some code after a continue statement that would be skipped over and then loop would start over x = 0 while x < 10: print(x) x = x + 1 continue print("This statement skipped over since it occurs after the continue statement"