>>raveni+(OP)
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.
>>iknows+if
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.
>>iknows+if
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.