Extraneous detail is omitted in the interest of conveying the basic idea and appearance. Since pseudo-code is not a formal programing language, the are no standards, but there are some traditions and conventions. Below we provide some general rules adopted in many text books about how an algorithm can be described via pseudo programming language. We can not and do not formally define this code, but simply explain it with reference well-known programming languages such as C or Java . You will notice that some of the pseudo-code in the handouts omits the do after while , or omits to boldface return .
Some textbooks simply write everything in text font, so the issue never arises.
Here are some formal statements. Most of them are similar to those occurring in any modern procedural computer language. The break statement, which stops execution of the innermost enclosing iterative statement. The continue statement, which stops the iteration in progress and causes execution to resume after the last statement in the while , do , or for , just before the loop iteration is to begin again. The return statement, which stops execution of the function where it appears and returns a value or structure to whomever called the function.