Switch Statement

It's hard to mention enumerated types without mentioning switch statements, because they often go hand in hand. A switch statement is an alternative to a chained conditional that is syntactically prettier and often more efficient. It looks like this:

This switch statement is equivalent to the following chained conditional:

The break statements are necessary in each branch in a switch statement because otherwise the flow of execution "falls through" to the next case. Without the break statements, the symbol + would make the program perform addition, and then perform multiplication, and then print the error message. Occasionally this feature is useful, but most of the time it is a source of errors when people forget the break statements.

switch statements work with integers, characters, and enumerated \mbox{types}. For example, to convert a Suit to the corresponding string, we could use something like:

In this case we don't need break statements because the return statements cause the flow of execution to return to the caller instead of falling through to the next case.

In general it is good style to include a default case in every switch statement, to handle errors or unexpected values.