Why are variables not local in case statements?

Question

I recently add another menu item to an android java app and was suprised that Eclipse said that variable from the previous case:break were not local (So I\'ve just added a s

Answer 1

Others have explained what you should do, and that this is a Java language thing, not an Android specific thing.

As to why the Java Language is defined this way, I haven't figured an entirely logical reason. The best I can think of is that if each of the case lists of a switch statement implicitly defined a scope, then the following could easily be misread:

case foo:
   int var = ...
   // note drop through
case bar:
                              int var = ...
   var = var + 1;
   break;

At least with the current definition of the scoping, all of the potentially confusing usages result in compilation errors.

(IMO, it would have been better to eschew case drop-through in switch statements ... just like C# does. But design mistakes like that are much easier to spot in hindsight, and are hard to correct once made.)