local scope in Java

Question

Why is it that curly braces do not define a separate local scope in Java? I was expecting this to be a feature common to the main curly brace languages (C, C++, Java, C#).<

Answer 1

They do define a separate local scope, but you still cannot mask local variables from a parent scope (but you can of course mask instance variables).

But you can define new variables (with different names) and their scope will be limited to within the braces.