$stop — Hard Stop Execution

$stop is the emergency brake of BDFD scripting. It immediately and unconditionally halts all further action processing. No commands after $stop are executed — the action sequence terminates at that exact point.

Behavior

When $stop is encountered:

1. The current action completees up to and including $stop.
2. All remaining actions in the current block are skipped.
3. If inside a loop ($for), the loop exits immediately — no further iterations.
4. If inside an $if, the enclosing $endif is not reached.
5. If inside a $try, execution halts before the $catch block — $stop overrides error handling.

$stop is dispatched as a BotCreatorActionType.stop action, which tells the BDFD runtime engine to terminate the execution pipeline.

No Arguments

$stop takes no arguments. The syntax is simply:

$stop

Any arguments provided are ignored.

Use Cases

• Early exit on invalid state: Stop immediately if required data is missing or corrupted.
• Content moderation: Halt execution when forbidden content is detected.
• Guard clauses: Check preconditions at the start of an action and stop if they fail.
• Loop breaking: Exit a $for loop prematurely based on a condition.
• Rate limiting: Stop processing if a user has exceeded their quota.

$stop vs $skipActions

Feature	$stop	$skipActions[n]
Scope	Halts all remaining actions	Skips only n next actions
Resumable	No	Yes, after skipping n
In loops	Exits the loop completeely	Skips actions within the loop

Use $stop for terminal halts; use $skipActions for non-terminal jumps.

Interaction with $try / $catch

If $stop is called inside a $try block, the $catch block is not executed. $stop bypasses error handling entirely. This is intentional — if you want to catch errors and then stop, call $stop inside the $catch block instead.

Common Pitfalls

• Placing important cleanup or logging code after $stop — it will never execute.
• Using $stop inside a $try and expecting the $catch to still run.
• Confusing $stop with $skipActions[1] — $stop kills the entire action sequence, not just the next command.