There was an early rule that Rust keywords should be five characters or less. I would guess it's because of this rule. I believe loop turned into cont to satisfy this rule, and then eventually we relaxed the rule, and it became continue.

Whoa, do you know who and why came up with that? So strange, making it less readable on purpose?

IIRC it was just a personal preference of Graydon's back then. I'm also not sure it was intended to live forever, just something to try and nudge things in a particular direction.

Terseness doesn't inherently mean less readable.

I do think that that rule is probably not one that would be good permanently.

Probably for the same reason that most new language these days cannot bring themselves to just use "function" and instead have "fn", "fun", "func", etc. It's a headlong pursuit of conciseness for the sake of conciseness.

I could see it… like “loop back around” or “continue loop”. I think good old “continue” is better and more familiar though :)