[ken]

What are "old-fashioned loops"? Does that mean C-style?

As an also Lisp programmer, I find Swift's limited (and fixed!) set of control flow constructs downright ancient. They added for-each loops, but that's it. We had more "modern control flow" in the 1980's.

[kccqzy]

Diversity in control flow constructs isn't necessarily a good thing. In imperative languages you see goto being discouraged and removed. In functional languages you see things like call-with-current-continuation discouraged.

[ken]

It is to me. The alternative is implementing them ad-hoc in every function. (Or perhaps waiting another few decades for Swift to add them to its compiler.) Having used many languages at different points on the power spectrum, I remain unconvinced that there's any advantage to omitting abstraction capabilities and forcing programmers to deal with it.

Besides, both of those examples are essentially non-local jumps, and I'm not sure I'd describe them as "modern".

In a sense, Swift already allows diversity in control flow constructs, via closures and the trailing closure syntax. It's just somewhat awkward, and not flexible enough to implement, say, most of Lisp's ITERATE library. That's packed full of exactly the kinds of control flow constructs that I have to write out by hand in Swift every day.