Why aren't variables declared in “try” in scope in “catch” or “finally”?

Question

In C# and in Java (and possibly other languages as well), variables declared in a \"try\" block are not in scope in the corresponding \"catch\" or \"finally\" blocks. For e

Answer 1

Traditionally, in C-style languages, what happens inside the curly braces stays inside the curly braces. I think that having the lifetime of a variable stretch across scopes like that would be unintuitive to most programmers. You can achieve what you want by enclosing the try/catch/finally blocks inside another level of braces. e.g.

... code ...
{
    string s = "test";
    try
    {
        // more code
    }
    catch(...)
    {
        Console.Out.WriteLine(s);
    }
}

EDIT: I guess every rule does have an exception. The following is valid C++:

int f() { return 0; }

void main() 
{
    int y = 0;

    if (int x = f())
    {
        cout << x;
    }
    else
    {
        cout << x;
    }
}

The scope of x is the conditional, the then clause and the else clause.